March 17, 2018

It’s the biggest Trump con since he told Americans the tax cut would help them more than the rich. He’s calling for a $1.5 trillion boost in infrastructure spending—but he’s proposing just $200 billion in federal funding.

So where does the rest come from? Tax hikes on the middle-class and poor, and from private investors.

1. State and local governments, already starved for cash, would have to raise taxes.

2. Private investors, for their part, won’t pitch in unless they’re guaranteed a good return on their investment, most likely in the form of tolls and other user fees. Or worse, governments might be forced to transfer ownership of roads and bridges to private corporations.

So the public will end up paying twice: in higher taxes and higher tolls, and won’t even get what’s needed.

3. Projects that will be most attractive to big investors are where tolls and fees will bring in the biggest bucks: Brand new highways and bridges rather than the thousands of smaller bridges, airports, pipes, and water treatment facilities most in need of repair.

4. Trump’s infrastructure plan only worsens the racial justice divide in America, by leaving disadvantaged communities behind while giving massive profits to the rich and corporations through new tolls and fees.

5. It’s a double con because now that Trump and the Republicans have enacted a huge tax cut for corporations and the rich, there’s no money left for infrastructure. The White House says the $200 billion of federal spending will be offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget, but doesn’t explain how or where. Given what we know of Trump’s and the GOP’s priorities, that means taking money from programs that protect vulnerable Americans, not from the billions in wasted on military spending.

A real infrastructure program—as opposed to Trump’s fake program—would focus on repairing existing infrastructure, doing so based on need rather than financial returns, prioritizing public transportation over private, and clean water and renewable energy over projects that generate more pollution.

And it would be paid for by closing tax loopholes used by big corporations and the rich, not by imposing higher taxes, Trump tolls and user fees on the rest of us.

To really make America great again we need more and better infrastructure that’s for the public—not for big developers and investors.

March 14, 2018

Baby Boomers – my generation, born between 1946 and 1964 – dominated politics and the economy for years. There were just more Boomers than people of any other generation. But that’s no longer the case. Now, the biggest generation is the Millennials, born between 1983 and 2000.

Millennials are different from boomers in 6 important ways that will shape the future.

1. Millennials are more diverse than boomers – so as Millennials gain clout, expect America to become more open.More than 44 percent of Millennials identify as a race other than white. And they’re more accepting of immigrants: 69 percent of millennials think that newcomers strengthen American society, compared to 44 percent of Boomers.

2. Millennials are more distrustful of the political system than Boomers – so as Millennials gain power, expect more anti-establishment politics. A strong majority of Millennials think the country is on the wrong track. Most disapprove of both the Republican Party and the Democratic party. Virtually no Millennials – only 6 percent – strongly approve of Donald Trump, compared to 63 percent who disapprove. A strong majority – 71 percent – want a third major party to compete with Democrats and Republicans.

3. Most Millennials have a tougher financial road than Boomers – so expect them to demand changes in how we finance higher education. According to Pew Research, Millennials are the first generation in the modern era, “to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty, and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than any other generation at the same stage of life.” No surprise, then, that Millennials are living at home much longer than previous generations, and getting married later.

4. Millennials view the social safety net differently than boomers – so expect them to demand that Medicare and Social Security are strengthened. Boomers move into older age, more and more of the federal budget is going into Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Many Millennials even doubt Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will be there for them when they retire.

5. Millennials care more about the environment – so expect them to demand stronger environmental protection. Over 90 percent of them believe climate change is occurring, compared with 74 percent of Boomers. Over 60 percent of Millennials want to reduce the use of coal as an energy source, compared with 28 percent of Boomers. And over half of Millennials support a carbon tax, compared with 23 percent of Boomers.

6. Finally, as wealthy Boomers transfer $30 trillion to their lucky Millennial heirs, expect Millennials to demand a fairer inter-generational tax system. America is now on the cusp of the largest inter-generational transfer of wealth in history. As very wealthy boomers expire, an estimated $30 trillion will go to their children and grandchildren over the next three decades. The tax code allows these lucky Millennials to inherit rich Boomer assets without paying capital gains on them, and paying far lower estate taxes than previous generations. Expect this to change.

As I said, I’m a Boomer – born the same year as Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Dolly Parton, among others. It’s up to you – the Millennials – to fix a system we Boomers broke.

March 10, 2018

On Friday, Martin Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison. What, if anything, does Shkreli’s downfall tell us about modern America?

Shkreli’s early life exemplified the rags-to-riches American success story. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in April 1983, to parents who immigrated from Albania and worked as janitors in New York apartment buildings. Shkreli attended New York’s Hunter College High School, a public school for intellectually gifted young people, and in 2005 received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Baruch College.

But soon thereafter, Shkreli turned toward shady deals. He started his own hedge fund, betting that the stock prices of certain biotech companies would drop. Then he used financial chat rooms on the Internet to savage the companies he bet against, causing their prices to drop and his bets to pay off.

In 2015, Shkreli founded and became CEO Turing Pharmaceuticals. Under his direction Turing spent $55 million for the U.S. rights to sell a drug called Daraprim. Developed in 1953, Daraprim is the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, a rare parasitic disease that can cause birth defects in unborn babies, and lead to seizures, blindness, and death in cancer patients and people with AIDS. Daraprim is on the World Health Organization’s list of Essential Medicines.

Months after he bought the drug, Schkreli raised its price by over 5,000 percent, from $13.50 a pill to $750.00.

Shkreli was roundly criticized, but he was defiant: “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.” He said he wished he had raised the price even higher, and would buy another essential drug and raise its price, too.

In February 2016, Shkreli was called before a congressional committee to justify his price increase on Daraprim. He refused to answer any questions, pleading the Fifth Amendment. After the hearing Shkreli tweeted, “Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government.”

Shkreli was subsequently arrested in connection with an unrelated scheme to defraud his former hedge fund investors. In anticipation of his criminal trial, Shkreli boasted to the New Yorker magazine, “I think they’ll return a not-guilty verdict in two hours. There are going to be jurors who will be fans of mine. I walk down the streets of New York and people shake my hand. They say, ‘I want to be just like you.’”

During his trial, Shkreli strolled into a room filled with reporters and made light of a particular witness, for which the trial judge rebuked him. On his Facebook page he mocked the prosecutors, and told news outlets they were a “junior varsity” team.

He retaliated against journalists who criticized him by purchasing internet domains associated with their names and ridiculing them on the sites. “I wouldn’t call these people ‘journalists,’” he wrote in an email to Business Insider. He said on Facebook that if he were acquitted he’d be able to have sex with a female journalist he often posted about online.

After his conviction, Shkreli called the case “a witch hunt of epic proportions, and maybe they found one or two broomsticks.” As she imposed sentence last Friday, the judge cited Shkrili’s “egregious multitude of lies,” noting also that he “repeatedly minimized” his conduct.

Shkreli’s story is tragic and pathetic, but I ask you: How different is Martin Shkreli from other figures who dominate American life today, even at the highest rungs?

Shkreli will do whatever it takes to win, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. He believes that the norms other people live by don’t apply to him. His attitude toward the law is that anything he wants to do is okay unless it is clearly illegal – and even if illegal, it’s okay if he can get away with it.

He’s contemptuous of anyone who gets in his way – whether judges, prosecutors, members of Congress, or journalists. He remains unapologetic for what he did. He is utterly shameless.

Sound familiar? The Shkreli personality disorder can be found on Wall Street, in the executive suites of some of America’s largest corporations, in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, in some of our most prestigious universities, and in Washington. If you look hard enough, you might even find it in Trump’s White House.

Face it: America has a Shkreli problem.

Martin Shkleri will spend the next seven years of his life in prison. What will happen with the other unbridled narcissists now in positions of power in America, who also blatantly defy the common good?

March 06, 2018

Before I turn to Jared Kushner, let me ask: Do you believe the U.S. government does the right thing all or most of the time?

The Gallup organization started asking this question in 1963, when over 70 percent of Americans said they did. Since then, the percent has steadily declined. By 2016, before Trump became president, only 16 percent of Americans agreed.

Why the decline? Surely various disappointments and scandals played a part – Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, “weapons of mass destruction,” the Wall Street bailout.

But the largest factor by far has been the rise of big money in politics. Most people no longer believe their voices count.

That view is backed by solid research. Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University analyzed 1,799 policy issues that came before Congress, and found “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, Gilens and Page concluded, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

It’s likely far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions.

Trump and Bernie Sanders – authoritarian populist and progressive populist, respectively – based their shockingly successful campaigns on the public’s outrage at the corruption of our democracy by big money. Sanders called for a “political revolution.” Trump promised to “drain the swamp.”

Which brings us to Jared Kushner, the putative swamp-drainer’s son-in-law, and major advisor.

Kushner may yet be indicted in Robert Mueller’s investigation. But it could turn out that Kushner’s most significant contribution to the stench of this administration will come from his financial conflicts of interest.

When he took the White House job, Kushner chose not to follow the usual practice of wealthy people when they join administrations – putting their assets into blind trusts managed by outside experts.

Instead, Kushner retained control over the vast majority of his interest in Kushner Companies, worth as much as $761 million, according to government ethics filings.

So how has Kushner separated his business dealings from his dealings on behalf of the United States? He hasn’t.

The Timesreported last week that after the CEOs of Citigroup and Apollo Global Management attended White House meetings set up by Kushner, the two firms loaned the Kushner family business more than $500 million.

Furthermore, once the loan was received, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped an inquiry of Apollo Global Management.

Last spring, Kushner’s real-estate firm sought hundreds of millions of dollars directly from the Qatar government, for its distressed property on Fifth Avenue, reports the Intercept. Soon after Qatar turned down the request, Kushner supported a diplomatic assault on Qatar that sparked a crisis continuing today.

Kushner is such an easy mark that officials in at least four countries have privately discussed ways to manipulate him with financial deals, according to U.S. intelligence.

Kushner insists that he’s done nothing wrong, and there’s no direct evidence he has profited off his position in White House or put personal financial interests ahead of the interests of the American public.

But that’s not the point. Conflicts of interest are always difficult to prove, which is why we have ethics rules to avoid even the appearance of such conflicts.

And it sure looks as if Kushner is using his White House perch to make money for himself, just as is his father-in-law.

It’s as bad for a government official to look as if he’s lining his pockets as for him to actually do so, because the appearance of corruption undermines public trust just as readily as the real thing. And trust is what distinguishes an advanced democracy from a banana republic.

But Trump and the members of his family he’s brought into his White House don’t give a hoot about public trust. They have utter contempt for the common good. Government ethics officials have compared Trump’s administration to a game of whack-a-mole – go after one potential violation, and others pop up.

Perhaps Kushner tells himself that the American public is already so cynical about big money’s takeover of our democracy that his own apparent, or real, conflicts are chicken feed by comparison.

Which may be true. But by adding to the distrust, Kushner is doing his own bit to destroy American democracy – actions almost as treasonous as if he colluded with Russians to make his father-in-law president.

March 05, 2018

Donald Trump once said he identified with Ayn Rand’s character Howard Roark in “The Fountainhead,” an architect so upset that a housing project he designed didn’t meet specifications he had it dynamited.

Others in Trump’s circle were influenced by Rand. “Atlas Shrugged” was said to be the favorite book of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s secretary of state. Rand also had a major influence on Mike Pompeo, Trump’s CIA chief. Trump’s first nominee for Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder, said he spent much of his free time reading Rand.

The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, required his staff to read Rand.

Uber’s founder and former CEO, Travis Kalanick, has described himself as a Rand follower. Before he was sacked, he applied many of her ideas to Uber’s code of values, and even used the cover art for Rand’s book “The Fountainhead” as his Twitter avatar.

Who is Ayn Rand and why does she matter? Ayn Rand – best known for two highly-popular novels still widely read today – “The Fountainhead,” published in 1943, and “Atlas Shrugged,” in 1957 – didn’t believe there was a common good. She wrote that selfishness is a virtue, and altruism is an evil that destroys nations.

When Rand offered these ideas they seemed quaint if not far-fetched. Anyone who lived through the prior half century witnessed our interdependence, through depression and war.

After the war we used our seemingly boundless prosperity to finance all sorts of public goods – schools and universities, a national highway system, and healthcare for the aged and poor (Medicare and Medicaid). We rebuilt war-torn Europe. We sought to guarantee the civil rights and voting rights of African-Americans. We opened doors of opportunity to women. Of course there was a common good. We were living it.

But then, starting in the late 1970s, Rand’s views gained ground. She became the intellectual godmother of modern-day American conservatism.

This utter selfishness, this contempt for the public, this win-at-any-cost mentality is eroding American life.

Without adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, we’re living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most unscrupulous get ahead, and where everyone must be wary in order to survive. This is not a society. It’s not even a civilization, because there’s no civility at its core. It’s a disaster.

In other words, we have to understand who Ayn Rand is so we can reject her philosophy and dedicate ourselves to rebuilding the common good.

The idea of the common good was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare” – not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”

Yet today you find growing evidence of its loss – CEOs who gouge their customers, loot their corporations and defraud investors. Lawyers and accountants who look the other way when corporate clients play fast and loose, who even collude with them to skirt the law.

Wall Street bankers who defraud customers and investors. Film producers and publicists who choose not to see that a powerful movie mogul they depend on is sexually harassing and abusing young women.

Politicians who take donations (really, bribes) from wealthy donors and corporations to enact laws their patrons want, or shutter the government when they don’t get the partisan results they seek.

And a president of the United States who lies repeatedly about important issues, refuses to put his financial holdings into a blind trust and then personally profits off his office, and foments racial and ethnic conflict.

The common good consists of our shared values about what we owe one another as citizens who are bound together in the same society. A concern for the common good – keeping the common good in mind – is a moral attitude. It recognizes that we’re all in it together.

February 28, 2018

How to build the economy? Not through trickle-down economics. Tax cuts to the rich and big corporations don’t lead to more investment and jobs.

The only real way to build the economy is through “rise-up” economics: Investments in our people – their education and skills, their health, and the roads and bridges and public transportation that connects them.

Trickle-down doesn’t work because money is global. Corporations and the rich whose taxes are cut invest the extra money wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

Rise-up economics works because American workers are the only resources uniquely American. Their productivity is the key to our future standard of living. And that productivity depends on their education, health, and infrastructure.Just look at the evidence.

Research shows that public investments grow the economy.

A recent study by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth found, for example, that every dollar invested in universal pre-kindergarten delivers $8.90 in benefits to society in the form of more productive adults.

Similarly, healthier children become more productive adults. Children who became eligible for Medicaid due to expansions in the 1980s and 1990s were more likely to attend college than similar children who did not become eligible.

Investments in infrastructure – highways, bridges, and public transportation – also grow the economy. It’s been estimated that every $1 invested in infrastructure generates at least $1.60 in benefits to society. Some research puts the return much higher.

In the three decades following World War II, we made huge investments in education, health, and infrastructure. The result was rising median incomes.

Since then, public investments have lagged, and median incomes have stagnated.

Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s tax cuts on the top didn’t raise incomes, and neither will Donald Trump’s.

Trickle-down economics is a hoax. But it’s a convenient hoax designed to enrich the moneyed interests. Rise-up economics is the real deal. But we must fight for it.

February 24, 2018

In 1963 over 70 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time; nowadays only 16 percent do.

There has been a similar decline in trust for corporations. In the late 1970s, 32 percent trusted big business, by 2016, only 18 percent did.

Trust in banks has dropped from 60 percent to 27 percent. Trust in newspapers, from 51 percent to 20 percent. Public trust has also plummeted for nonprofits, universities, charities, and religious institutions.

Why this distrust? As economic inequality has widened, the moneyed interests have spent more and more of their ever-expanding wealth to alter the rules of the game to their own advantage.

Too many leaders in business and politics have been willing to do anything to make more money or to gain more power – regardless of the consequences for our society.

We see this everywhere – in the new tax giveaway to big corporations, in gun manufacturer’s use of the NRA to block gun controls, in the Koch Brother’s push to roll back environmental regulations, in Donald Trump’s profiting off his presidency.

No wonder much of the public no longer believes that America’s major institutions are working for the many. Increasingly, they have become vessels for the few.

The question is whether we can restore the common good. Can the system be made to work for the good of all?

Some of you may feel such a quest to be hopeless. The era we are living in offers too many illustrations of greed, narcissism, and hatefulness. But I don’t believe it hopeless.

Almost every day I witness or hear of the compassion of ordinary Americans – like the thousands who helped people displaced by the wildfires in California and floods in Louisiana; like the two men in Seattle who gave their lives trying to protect a young Muslim woman from a hate-filled assault; like the coach who lost his life in Parkland, Florida, trying to shield students from a gunman; like the teenagers who are demanding that Florida legislators take action on guns.

The challenge is to turn all this into a new public spiritedness extending to the highest reaches in the land – a public morality that strengthens our democracy, makes our economy work for everyone, and revives trust in the major institutions of America.

We have never been a perfect union; our finest moments have been when we sought to become more perfect than we had been. We can help restore the common good by striving for it and showing others it’s worth the effort.

I started my career a half-century ago in the Senate office of Robert F. Kennedy, when the common good was well understood, and I’ve watched it unravel over the last half-century.

Resurrecting it may take another half century, or more. But as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.“

February 20, 2018

First, you can complain. Yell. Bang on the dinner table. Tell your family and friends the man is a dangerous fool. Explode every time you read something about him. Swear every time you see him on TV. Go ballistic when you listen to him or about him on the radio.

Complaining may feel good, but it won’t help.

Your second choice: You can bury your head in the sand. Pretend he’s not there. Stop reading the news. Turn off the TV and radio. No longer visit political Internet sites. When family or friends bring up his name, change the subject.

Burying your head in the sand may also feel good, but it certainly won’t help, either.

You have a third choice. You can get active, and make it harder for Trump to damage America. This coming November 6, 34 senate seats, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, and 36 governorships will be up for election or re-election.

Support primary candidates who will resist Trump. Mobilize to get out the vote. Organize so that November 6 becomes a total repudiation of Donald Trump and all he stands for.

Start right now. Find an Indivisible group near you. Go Indivisible.org and become part of the solution. If you’re already in a blue state and want to reach out to purple or red parts of the country, visit swingleft.org or sisterdistrict.com.

February 18, 2018

Others want a land inhabited by self-seeking individuals free to accumulate as much money and power as possible, who pay taxes only to protect their assets from criminals and foreign aggressors.

Others think mainly about flags, national anthems, pledges of allegiance, military parades, and secure borders.

Trump encourages a combination of all three – tribalism, libertarianism, and loyalty.

But the core of our national identity has not been any of this. It has been found in the ideals we share – political equality, equal opportunity, freedom of speech and of the press, a dedication to open inquiry and truth, and to democracy and the rule of law.

We are not a race. We are not a creed. We are a conviction – that all people are created equal, that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and that government should be of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Political scientist Carl Friedrich, comparing Americans to Gallic people, noted that “to be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact.”

That idealism led Lincoln to proclaim that America might yet be the “last best hope” for humankind. It prompted Emma Lazarus, some two decades later, to welcome to America the world’s “tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

It inspired the poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and the songs of Woody Guthrie. All turned their love for America into demands that we live up to our ideals. “This land is your land, this land is my land,” sang Guthrie. “Let America be America again,” pleaded Hughes: “The land that never has been yet – /And yet must be – the land where every man is free. / The land that’s mind – the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME –.”

That idealism sought to preserve and protect our democracy – not inundate it with big money, or allow one party or candidate to suppress votes from rivals, or permit a foreign power to intrude on our elections.

It spawned a patriotismthat once required all of us take on a fair share of the burdens of keeping America going – paying taxes in full rather than seeking loopholes or squirreling money away in foreign tax shelters, serving in the armed forces or volunteering in our communities rather than relying on others to do the work.

These ideals compelled us to join together for the common good – not pander to bigotry or divisiveness, or fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions.

The idea of a common good was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare” – not for “me the narcissist seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”

Yet the common good seems to have disappeared. The phrase is rarely uttered today, not even by commencement speakers and politicians.

There’s growing evidence of its loss – in CEOs who gouge their customers and loot their corporations; Wall Street bankers who defraud their investors; athletes involved in doping scandals; doctors who do unnecessary procedures to collect fatter fees; and film producers and publicists who choose not to see that a powerful movie mogul they depend on is sexually harassing and abusing women.

We see its loss in politicians who take donations from wealthy donors and corporations and then enact laws their patrons want, or shutter the government when they don’t get the partisan results they seek.

And in a president of the United States who has repeatedly lied about important issues, refuses to put his financial holdings into a blind trust and personally profits from his office, and foments racial and ethnic conflict.

This unbridled selfishness, this contempt for the public, this win-at-any-cost mentality, is eroding America.

Without binding notions about right and wrong, only the most unscrupulous get ahead. When it’s all about winning, only the most unprincipled succeed. This is not a society. It’s not even a civilization, because there’s no civility at its core.

If we’re losing our national identity it’s not because we now come in more colors, practice more religions, and speak more languages than we once did.

It is because we are forgetting the real meaning of America – the ideals on which our nation was built. We are losing our sense of the common good.

February 09, 2018

Trump’s promise that corporations will use his giant new tax cut to make new investments and raise workers’ wages is proving to be about as truthful as his promise to release his tax returns.

The results are coming in, and guess what? Almost all the extra money is going into stock buybacks. Since the tax cut became law, buy-backs have surged to $88.6 billion. That’s more than double the amount of buybacks in the same period last year, according to data provided by Birinyi Associates.

Compare this to the paltry $2.5 billion of employee bonuses corporations say they’ll dispense in response to the tax law, and you see the bonuses for what they are – a small fig leaf to disguise the big buybacks.

If anything, the current tumult in the stock market will fuel even more buybacks.

Stock buybacks are corporate purchases of their own shares of stock. Corporations do this to artificially prop up their share prices.

Buybacks are the corporate equivalent of steroids. They may make shareholders feel better than otherwise, but nothing really changes.

Money spent on buybacks isn’t reinvested in new equipment, research, or factories. Buybacks don’t add jobs or raise wages. They don’t increase productivity. They don’t grow the American economy.

Yet CEOs love buybacks because most CEO pay is now in shares of stock and stock options rather than cash. So when share prices go up, executives reap a bonanza.

At the same time, the value of CEO pay from previous years also rises, in what amounts to a retroactive (and off the books) pay increase – on top of their already humongous compensation packages.

Buybacks used to be illegal. The Securities and Exchange considered them unlawful means of manipulating stock prices, in violation of the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934.

In those days, the typical corporation put about half its profits into research and development, plant and equipment, worker retraining, additional jobs, and higher wages.

But under Ronald Reagan, who rhapsodized about the “magic of the market,” the SEC legalized buybacks.

After that, buybacks took off. Just in the past decade, 94 percent of corporate profits have been devoted to buybacks and dividends, according to researchers at the Academic-Industry Research Network.

Last year, big American corporations spent a record $780 billion buying back their shares of stock.

And that was before the new tax law.

Put another way, the new tax law is giving America’s wealthy not one but two big windfalls: They stand to gain the most from the tax cuts for individuals, and they’re the big winners from the tax cuts for corporations.

This isn’t just unfair. It’s also bad for the economy as a whole. Corporations don’t invest because they get tax cuts. They invest because they expect that customers will buy more of their goods and services.

This brings us to the underlying problem. Companies haven’t been investing – and have been using their profits to buy back their stock instead – because they doubt their investments will pay off in additional sales.

That’s because most economic gains have been going to the wealthy, and the wealthy spend a far smaller percent of their income than the middle class and the poor. When most gains go to the top, there’s not enough demand to justify a lot of new investment.

Which also means that as long as public policies are tilted to the benefit of those at the top – as is Trump’s tax cut, along with Reagan’s legalization of stock buybacks – we’re not going to see much economic growth.

February 08, 2018

Trump to global CEOs and financiers in Davos, Switzerland: “America is open for business.” We’re now a great place for you to make money. We’ve slashed taxes and regulations so you can make a bundle here.

Trump to ambitious young immigrants around the world, including those brought here as children: America is closed. We don’t want you. Forget that poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty about bringing us your poor yearning to breathe free. Don’t even try.

In Trump’s America, global capital is welcome, people aren’t.

Well, I have news for the so-called businessman. America was built by ambitious people from all over the world, not by global capital.

Global capital wants just one thing: A high return on its investment.

Global capital has no obligation to any country or community. If there’s another place around the world where taxes are lower and regulations laxer, global capital will move there at the speed of an electronic blip.

Global capital doesn’t care how it gets a high return. If it can get it by slashing wages, outsourcing to contract workers, polluting air and water, defrauding investors, or destroying communities, it will.

People are different. Once they’ve rooted somewhere, they generally stay put. They develop webs of connections and loyalties.

If they’re ambitious – and, let’s face it, the one characteristic that almost all immigrants to America have shared for more than two centuries is ambition – they develop skills, educate their kids, and contribute to their communities and their nation.

My great grandfather arrived in America from Ukraine. He was nineteen years old and penniless. What brought him here was his ambition. He built a business. He started a family.

Then he invited his brothers and sisters from Ukraine to join him. He put them up in his home and gave them some of his savings to start their own lives as Americans.

You may call it “chain migration,” Mr. Trump, but we used to call it “family reunification.” We believed it wasn’t just humane to allow members from abroad to join their loved ones here, but also good for the America. It made the nation stronger and more prosperous.

By the way, Mr. Trump, global capital doesn’t create jobs. Jobs are created when customers want more goods and services. Nobody invests in a business unless they expect consumers to buy what that business will produce. Those consumers include immigrants.

Consumers are also workers. The more productive they are and the better they’re paid, the more goods and services they buy – creating a virtuous circle of higher wages and more jobs.

They become more productive and better paid when they have access to good schools and universities, good health care, and well-maintained transportation systems linking them together.

This combination – people rooted in families and communities, supplemented by ambitious young immigrants, all aided by good education and infrastructure – made America the economic powerhouse it is today.

Along the way, regulations proved to be necessary guardrails. We protected the environment, prevented fraud, and tried to stop financial entities from gambling away everyone’s savings, because we came to see that capitalism without such guardrails is a mudslide.

We didn’t accomplish what we’ve achieved by cutting taxes and slashing regulations so global investors could make more money in America, while preventing ambitious immigrants from coming to our shores.

We raised taxes – especially on big corporations and wealthy individuals – in order to finance good schools, public universities, and infrastructure. We regulated business. And we welcomed immigrants and reunited families.

Global capital came our way not because we were a cheap place to do business but because we were fabulously productive and innovative place to do business.

Now Trump and his rich backers want to undo all this. No one should be surprised. When they look at the economy they only see money. They’ve made lots of it.

But the real economy is people. America should be open to ambitious people even if they’re dirt poor, like my great grandfather. It should also be open to their relations, whose family members here will give them a start.

It should invest in people, as it once did.

America didn’t become great by global capital seeking higher returns but by people from all over world seeking better lives. And global capital won’t make it great again.

February 06, 2018

If Robert Mueller finds that Trump colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 election, or even if Trump fires Mueller before he makes such a finding, Trump’s supporters will protect Trump from any political fallout.

Trump’s base will stand by him not because they believe Trump is on their side, but because they define themselves as being on his side.

Trump has intentionally cleaved America into two warring camps: pro-Trump and anti-Trump. And he has convinced the pro-Trumps that his enemy is their enemy.

Most Americans are not passionate conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. But they have become impassioned Trump supporters or Trump haters.

Polls say 37 percent of Americans approve of him, and most disapprove. These numbers are the tips of two vast icebergs of intensity.

Trump has forced all of us to take sides, and to despise those on the other. There’s no middle ground.

The Republican Party used to stand for fiscal responsibility, state’s rights, free trade, and a hard line against Russian aggression. Now it just stands for Trump.

Pro-Trump Republicans remain the majority in the GOP. As long as Trump can keep them riled up, and as long as Republicans remain in control of at least one chamber of Congress, he’s safe.

“Try to impeach him, just try it,” Roger Stone, Trump’s former campaign adviser, warned last summer. “You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection like you’ve never seen.”

That’s probably an exaggeration, but Trump (with the assistance of his enablers in Congress) has convinced his followers that the Russian investigation is part of a giant conspiracy to unseat him, and that his enemies want to replace him with someone who will allow dangerous forces to overrun America.

Sure, this paranoia is based on the same racism and xenophobia that has smoldered in America since its inception. Trump’s strategy is to stoke it daily.

Sure, American politics had polarized before Trump. Trump’s strategy is to exploit and enlarge these divisions.

A few months ago I traveled to Kentucky and talked with a number of Trump supporters.

They looked and sounded nothing like traditional conservative Republicans. Most were working class. Several were members of labor unions. All were passionate about Trump.

Why do you support him? I asked. “He’s shaking Washington up,” was the typical response.

I mentioned his lies. “He’s telling it like it is,” several told me. “He speaks his mind.”

I talked about his attacks on democracy. “Every other politician is on the take,” they said. “He isn’t. He doesn’t need their money.”

I asked about his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. They told me they didn’t believe a word of it. “It’s a plot to get rid of him.”

By making himself the center of an intensifying conflict, Trump grabs all the attention and fuels even greater passions on both sides.

It’s what he did in the 2016 election, but on a far larger scale. Then, he sucked all the oxygen out of the race by making himself its biggest story. Now, he’s sucking all the oxygen out of America by making himself our national obsession.

Trump received more coverage in the 2016 election than any presidential candidate in American history. Hillary Clinton got far less, and what she got was almost all about her emails.

Schooled in reality television and New York tabloids, Trump knows how to keep both sides stirred up: Vilify, disparage, denounce, defame, and accuse the other side of conspiring against America. Do it continuously. Dominate every news cycle.

Fox News is his propaganda arm, magnifying his tweets, rallies, and lies. The rest of the media also plays into Trump’s strategy by making him the defining controversy of America. Every particular dispute – DACA, the “wall,” North Korea, Mueller’s investigation, and so on – becomes another aspect of the larger national war over Trump.

It’s the divide-and-conquer strategy of a tyrant.

Democracies require sufficient social trust that citizens regard the views of those they disagree with as worthy of equal consideration to their own. That way, they’ll accept political outcomes they dislike.

Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy is to destroy that trust.

So if Mueller finds Trump colluded with Russia, or Trump fires Mueller before Mueller makes such a finding, the pro-Trumps will block any consequential challenge to his authority.

February 04, 2018

Fresh off passing massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Trump and congressional Republicans want to use the deficit they’ve created to justify huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

As House Speaker Paul Ryan says “We’re going to have to get… at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit.”

Don’t let them get away with it.

Social Security and Medicare are critical safety-nets for working and middle-class families.

Before they existed, Americans faced grim prospects. In 1935, the year Social Security was enacted, roughly half of America’s seniors lived in poverty. By the 1960s poverty among seniors had dropped significantly, but medical costs were still a major financial burden and only half of Americans aged 65 and over had health insurance. Medicare fixed that, guaranteeing health care for older Americans.

Today less than 10 percent of seniors live in poverty and almost all have access to health care. According to an analysis of census data, Social Security payments keep an estimated 22 million Americans from slipping into poverty.

Medicaid is also a vital lifeline for America’s elderly and the poor. Yet the Trump administration has already started whittling it away by encouraging states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients.

Republicans like to call these programs “entitlements,” as if they’re some kind of giveaway. But Americans pay into Social Security and Medicare throughout their entire working lives. It’s Americans’ own money they’re getting back through these programs.

These vital safety nets should be strengthened, not weakened. How?

1. Lift the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax. Currently, top earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $120,000 of their yearly income. So the rich end up, in effect, paying a lower Social Security tax rate than everyone else. Lifting the ceiling on what wealthy Americans contribute would help pay for the Baby Boomers retirements and leave Social Security in good shape for Millennials.

2. Allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower prescription drug prices. As the nation’s largest insurer, Medicare has tremendous bargaining power. Why should Americans pay far more for drugs than people in any other country?

3. Finally, reduce overall health costs and create a stronger workforce by making Medicare available to all. There’s no excuse for the richest nation in the world to have 28 million Americans still uninsured.

We need to not just secure, but revitalize Social Security and these other programs for our children, and for our children’s children. Millennials just overtook Baby Boomers as our nation’s largest demographic. For them — for all of us — we need to say loud and clear to all of our members of congress: Hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Expand and improve these programs: don’t cut them.

February 03, 2018

1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his new tax law does the opposite. By 2027, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the richest 1 percent will have got 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. But more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — will pay more in taxes. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”

2. He promised to close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers,” especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law keeps the “carried interest” loophole.

3. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 23 million Americans off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. The new tax law will result in 13 million people losing health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

4. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure.

5. He said he’d drain the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.

6. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants (one of them hired and fired in a little more than a week) that people there barely know who’s in charge of what.

7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”

8. He told you he’d “stop foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections.

9. He told you “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But he and House Speaker Paul Ryan are already planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich.

10. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this.

11. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president Xi Jinping and declared “China is not a currency manipulator.” Ever since then, Trump has been cozying up to Xi.

12. He said he “won’t bomb Syria.” You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.

13. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border. You believed him. But chief of staff John Kelly says it is “unlikely that we will build a wall, a physical barrier, from sea to shining sea.”

14. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.

15. He said he would not be a president who took vacations, and he called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief.” You bought it. But since becoming President he has spent nearly 25 percent of his days at one of his golf properties for some portion of the day, according to Golf News Network, at a cost to taxpayers of over $77 million. That’s already more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama cost in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.

16. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be “consequences” for companies that shipped jobs abroad. You believed him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest have continued to ship jobs to Mexico and China. Carrier (a division of United Technologies) has moved ahead with plans to send 1,000 jobs at its Indiana plant to Mexico. Notwithstanding, the federal government has rewarded United Technologies with 15 new contracts since Trump’s inauguration. GE is sending jobs to Canada. IBM is sending them to Costa Rica, Egypt, Argentina, and Brazil. There have been no “consequences” for sending all these jobs overseas.

17. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and “bring back thousands” of lost mining jobs. You bought it. But coal jobs continue to disappear. Since Trump’s victory, at least 6 plants that relied on coal have closed or announced they will close. Another 40 are projected to close during the president’s four-year term. Utilities continue to switch to natural gas instead of coal, and renewable energy is cheaper than ever.

18. He promised to protect steel workers. But according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were 19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last year. That import surge has hurt American steel workers, who were already struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel.

19. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But according to Mass Shooting Tracker, there have been 377 mass shootings so far in the Trump administration, including 58 people killed and hundreds injured at a concert in Las Vegas, and 26 churchgoers killed and 20 injured at a church in Texas. Trump refuses to consider any gun control legislation.

20. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,“ he promised during the campaign. He hasn’t released his taxes.

January 22, 2018

America has never had a president as deeply unpopular at this stage of his presidency, or one who has sucked up more political oxygen. This isn’t good news for the Republican Party this November or in the future, because the GOP has sold its soul to Trump.

Three principles once gave the GOP its identity and mission: Shrink the deficit, defend states’ rights, and be tough on Russia.

Now, after a year with the raving man-child who now occupies the White House, the Republican Party has taken a giant U-turn. Budget deficits are dandy, state’s rights are obsolete, and Russian aggression is no big deal.

By embracing a man whose only principles are winning and getting even, the Republican Party no longer stands for anything other than Trump.

Start with fiscal responsibility.

When George W. Bush took office in 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected a $5.6 trillion budget surplus over 10 years. Yet even this propitious outlook didn’t stop several Republicans from arguing against the Bush tax cut out of concern it would increase the nation’s debt.

A few years later, congressional Republicans were apoplectic about Obama’s spending plan, necessitated by the 2008 financial crisis. Almost every Republican in Congress opposed it. They argued it would dangerously increase in the federal debt.

“Yesterday the Senate cast one of the most expensive votes in history,” intoned Senator Mitch McConnell. “Americans are wondering how we’re going to pay for all this.” Paul Ryan warned the nation was “heading for a debt crisis.”

Now, with America’s debt at the highest level since shortly after World War II – 77 percent of GDP – Trump and the GOP have enacted a tax law that by their own estimates will increase the debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the decade.

What happened to fiscal responsibility? McConnell, Ryan, and the rest of the GOP have gone mum about it. Politics came first: They and Trump had to enact the big tax cut in order to reward their wealthy patrons.

States’ rights used to be the second pillar of Republican thought.

For decades, Republicans argued that the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment protected the states from federal intermeddling.

They used states’ rights to resist desegregation; to oppose federal legislation protecting workers, consumers, and the environment; and to battle federal attempts to guarantee marriage rights for gays and lesbians.

When, in 2013, the Supreme Court relied on states’ rights to strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, then-Senator Jeff Sessions broke out the champagne. “good news!“ said the GOP’s leading advocate of states’ rights. =

But after a year of Trump, Republicans have come around to thinking states have few if any rights.

As Attorney General, Sessions has green-lighted a federal crackdown on marijuana in states that have legalized it.

He and Trump are also blocking sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants. (A federal judge recently stayed Trump’s executive order on grounds that it violates the Tenth Amendment, but Trump and Sessions are appealing the decision.)

Trump is also seeking to gut California’s tough environmental rules. His Interior Department is opening more of California’s federal land and coastline to oil and gas drilling, and Trump’s EPA is moving to repeal new restrictions on a type of heavily-polluting truck California was relying on to meet its climate and air quality goals.

Meanwhile, the Republican House has approved the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would prevent states from enforcing their own laws barring concealed handguns against visitors from other states that permitted them.

For the new GOP, states’ rights be damned. Now it’s all about consolidating power in Washington, under Trump.

The third former pillar of Republicanism was a hard line on Russian aggression.

When Obama forged the New Start treaty with Moscow in 2010, Republicans in Congress charged that Vladimir Putin couldn’t be trusted to carry out any arms control agreement.

And they complained that Obama wasn’t doing enough to deter Putin in Eastern Ukraine. “Every time [Obama] goes on national television and threatens Putin or anyone like Putin, everybody’s eyes roll, including mine,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. “We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression.”

That was then. Now, despite explicit findings by American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election – the most direct attack on American democracy ever attempted by a foreign power – Republicans in Congress want to give Russia a pass.

They don’t even want to take steps to prevent further Russian meddling. They’ve played down a January report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warning that the Kremlin will likely move to influence upcoming U.S. elections, including those this year and in 2020.

The reason, of course, is the GOP doesn’t want to do anything that might hurt Trump or rile his followers.

The GOP under Trump isn’t the first political party to bend its principles to suit political expediency. But it may be the first to jettison its principles entirely, and over so short a time.

If Republicans no longer care about the federal debt, or state’s rights, or Russian aggression – what exactly do they care about? What are the core principles of today’s Republican Party?

Winning and getting even.

But as a year with Trump as president has shown, this is no formula for governing.

Moynihan noted that in 2017, Bank of America had $16.6 billion of net income available to shareholders and returned $16.8 billion through dividends and buyback. “So, yes, we will expect to return more capital to shareholders given the tax [cut].”

Even the expectation of a big corporate tax cut have caused shares to soar.

Because the richest 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of all shares of stock, and the richest fifth owns 80 percent, this is great news for the wealthy.

Rubbish.Analysts at RBC Capital Markets believe Apple will bring back to the U.S. $207 billion after taxes and “almost all of it” will be used to reward shareholders through share buybacks or dividends.

Apple also announced that all employees will get $2,500 of restricted stock. Good for Apple employees, but another acknowledgement that the biggest beneficiaries of the tax cut will be shareholders.

The new tax law is a great deal for Apple and its shareholders. Apple has been sitting on a huge “overseas” money hoard of some $252 billion, as Apple’s accountants have assigned its earnings to other countries with lower tax rates than the United States.

Now, though, Apple’s accountants can reallocate the money to the United States subject to a one-time tax of 15.5 percent – lower even than the new corporate tax of 21 percent.

In addition, the new law allows U.S. companies to pay only a 10.5 percent tax on “foreign profits” – inviting Apple’s accountants to continue to find ways to transfer its future profits abroad, and further boosting Apple’s shares.

Bottom line: Apple pays less in taxes so it can send out more dividends and buy back more shares of stock.

Make no mistake: Trump and the Republicans are working on behalf of America’s biggest and richest investors, not American workers.

This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the big investors are the ones who invested in getting Trump and the Republicans into office.

January 13, 2018

Now that Trump has been president for almost a year, it’s time the media called his behavior for what it is rather than try to normalize it. Here are the six most misleading media euphemisms for conduct unbecoming a president:

1. Calling Trump’s tweets “presidential “statements” or “press releases.” “The President is the President of the United States, so they’re considered official statements by the President of the United States,” Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, said last June when asked during his daily briefing how his tweets should be characterized

Wrong. Trump’s tweets are mostly rants off the top of his head – many of them wild, inconsistent, rude, crude, and bizarre.

Normal presidential statements are products of careful thought. Advisers weigh in. Consequences are considered. Alternatives are deliberated. Which is why such statements are considered important indicators of public policy, domestically and internationally.

Trump’s tweet storms are relevant only to judging his mood on a particular day at a particular time.

Rubbish. Unlike the White House and Camp David, the traditional presidential retreat, both of which are owned by taxpayers, Mar-a-Lago is a profit-making business owned by Trump.

The White House is open for public tours; Mar-a-Lago is open only to members who can pay $200,000 to join.

Mar-a-Lago, along with the other Trump resort properties that he visits regularly, constitute a massive conflict of interest. Every visit promotes the Trump resort brand, adding directly to Trump’s wealth.

Normal presidents don’t make money off the presidency. Trump does. His resorts should be called what they are – Trump’s businesses.

Last fall, NPR’s then news director, Michael Oreskes defended NPR’s refusal to use the term “liar” when describing Trump, explaining that the word constitutes “an angry tone” of “editorializing” that “confirms opinions.”

In January, Maggie Haberman, a leading Times’ political reporter, claimed that her job was “showing when something untrue is said. Our job is not to say ‘lied.’”

Wrong. Normal presidents may exaggerate; some occasionally lie. But Trump has taken lying to an entirely new level. He lies like other people breath. Almost nothing that comes out of his mouth can assumed to be true.

For Trump, lying is part of his overall strategy, his MO, and his pathology. Not to call them lies, or to deem him a liar, is itself misleading.

4. Referring to Trump’s and his aide’s possible “cooperation” or “coordination” with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.

This won’t due. “Cooperation” and “coordination” sound as if Trump and his campaign assistants were merely being polite to the Russians, engaged in a kind of innocent parallel play.

But nothing about what we’ve seen and heard so far suggests politeness or innocence. “Collusion” is the proper word, suggesting complicity in a conspiracy.

If true – if Trump or his aides did collude with the Russians to throw the election his way – they were engaged in treason, another important word that rarely appears in news reports.

Rubbish. They’re not going after “welfare.” Welfare – federal public assistance to the poor – was gutted in 1996. Trump and Ryan are aiming at Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Nor are they seeking to “reform” these programs. They want to cut them in order to pay for the huge tax cut they’ve given corporations and the wealthy. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform,” Ryan said recently, “which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit.”

So call it what it is: Planned cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

6. Describing Trump’s comments as “racially charged.” “Racially charged” sounds like Trump doesn’t intend them to be racist but some people hear them that way. Rubbish.

Trump’s recent harangue against immigrants from “shitholes” in Latin America and Africa comes only weeks after The New York Timesreported that at another Oval Office meeting Trump said Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and that Nigerians who visit the US would never “go back to their huts.”

This is the man who built his political career on the racist lie that Barack Obama was born in Africa, who launched his presidential campaign with racist comments about Mexican immigrants, who saw “fine people on both sides” in the Charlottesville march of white supremacists, and who attacked African-American football players for being “unpatriotic” because they kneeled during the National Anthem to protest police discrimination.

This is the same man who in 1989 took out full page ads in New York newspapers demanding the return of the death penalty so it could be applied to five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park – and who still refuses to admit his error even though they were exonerated by DNA evidence.

Stop using terms like “racially charged” to describe his statements. Face it. Trump is a racist, and his comments are racist.

Words matter. It’s important to describe Trump accurately. Every American must understand who we have as president.

January 08, 2018

For more than a year now, I’ve been hearing from people in the inner circles of official Washington – GOP lobbyists, Republican pundits, even a few Republican members of Congress – that Donald Trump is remarkably stupid.

I figured they couldn’t be right because really stupid people don’t become presidents of the United States. Even George W. Bush was smart enough to hire smart people to run his campaign and then his White House.

Several months back when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron,” I discounted it. I know firsthand how frustrating it can be to serve in a president’s cabinet, and I’ve heard members of other president’s cabinets describe their bosses in similar terms.

Now comes “Fire and Fury,” a book by journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed more than 200 people who dealt with Trump as a candidate and president, including senior White House staff members.

In it, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls Trump a “dope.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus both refer to him as an “idiot.” Rupert Murdoch says Trump is a “f—king idiot.”

Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn describes Trump as “dumb as sh-t,” explaining that “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

When one of Trump’s campaign aides tried to educate him about the Constitution, Trump couldn’t focus. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the aide recalled, "before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

Trump doesn’t think he’s stupid. “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he tweeted last Saturday. As he earlier recounted, “I went to an Ivy League college … I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”

Trump wasn’t exactly an academic star. One of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance purportedly said that he was “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”

Trump biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton on a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who had known Trump’s older brother.

But hold on. It would be dangerous to underestimate this man.

Even if Trump doesn’t read, can’t follow a logical argument, and has the attention span of a fruit fly, it still doesn’t follow that he’s stupid.

There’s another form of intelligence, called “emotional intelligence.”

Emotional intelligence is a concept developed by two psychologists, John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire, and Yale’s Peter Salovey, and it was popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996 book of the same name.

Mayer and Salovey define emotional intelligence as the ability to do two things – “understand and manage our own emotions,” and “recognize and influence the emotions of others.”

Granted, Trump hasn’t displayed much capacity for the first. He’s thin-skinned, narcissistic, and vindictive. As dozens of Republican foreign policy experts put it, “he is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate criticism."

Okay, but what about Mayer and Salovey’s second aspect of emotional intelligence – influencing the emotions of others?

This is where Trump shines. He knows how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover their emotional vulnerabilities – their fears, anxieties, prejudices, and darkest desires – and use them for his own purposes.

To put it another way, Trump is an extraordinarily talented conman.

He’s always been a conman. He conned hundreds of young people and their parents into paying to attend his near worthless Trump University. He conned banks into lending him more money even after he repeatedly failed to pay them. He conned contractors to work for him and then stiffed them.

Granted, he hasn’t always been a great conman. Had he been, his cons would have paid off.

By his own account, in 1976, when Trump was starting his career, he was worth about $200 million, much of it from his father. Today he says he’s worth some $8 billion. If he’d just put the original $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth $12 billion today.

But he’s been a great political conman. He conned 62,979,879 Americans to vote for him in November 2016 by getting them to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the “wonderful,” “beautiful” things he’d do for the people who’d support him.

And he’s still conning many of them.

Political conning is Trump’s genius. This genius – combined with his utter stupidity in every other dimension of his being – poses a clear and present danger to America and the world.

December 29, 2017

Almost one year in, it’s time for another update for Trump voters on his election promises:

1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his new tax law does the opposite. By 2027, according several nonpartisan analyses, the richest 1 percent will have got 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”

2. He promised to close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers,” especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law keeps the “carried interest” loophole.

3. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 23 million off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. The new tax law will result in 13 million people losing health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

4. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’ crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure.

5. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.

6. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants (one of them hired and fired in a little more than a week) that people there barely know who’s in charge of what.

7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”

8. He promised “a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections.

9. He told you “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But he and House Speaker Paul Ryan are already planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich.

10. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this.

11. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president Xi Jinping and declared “China is not a currency manipulator.” Ever since then, Trump has been cozying up to Xi.

12. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. But then he bombed Syria.

13. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border. You believed him. But there’s no money for that, either. Chief of staff John Kelly says it is “unlikely that we will build a wall, a physical barrier, from sea to shining sea.”

14. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.

15. He said he would not be a president who took vacations. “I would not be a president that takes time off,” he promised, and he called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief.” You bought it. But since becoming President he has spent nearly 25 percent of his days at one of his golf properties for some portion of the day, according to Golf News Network, at a cost to taxpayers of over $77 million. That’s already more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama cost in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.

16. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be “consequences” for companies that shipped jobs abroad. You believed him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest have continued to ship jobs to Mexico and China. Carrier (a division of United Technologies) has moved ahead with plans to send 1,000 jobs at its Indiana plant to Mexico. Notwithstanding, the federal government has rewarded United Technologies with 15 new contracts since Trump’s inauguration. Last year, Microsoft opened a new factory in Wilsonville, Oregon, that was supposed to herald a new era in domestic tech manufacturing. But in July, the company announced it was closing the plant. More than 100 workers and contractors will lose their jobs when production shifts to China. GE is sending jobs to Canada. IBM is sending them to Costa Rica, Egypt, Argentina, and Brazil. There have been no “consequences” for sending all these jobs overseas.

17. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and “bring back thousands” of lost mining jobs. You bought it. But coal jobs continue to disappear. Since Trump’s victory, at least 6 plants that relied on coal have closed or announced they will close. Another 40 are projected to close during the president’s four-year term. Utilities continue to switch to natural gas instead of coal.

18. He promised to protect steel workers. But according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were 19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last year. That import surge has hurt American steel workers, who were already struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel. For example, ArcelorMittal just announced it will soon lay off 150 of its 207 steel workers at its plant in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.

19. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But according to Mass Shooting Tracker, there have been 377 mass shootings so far this year, including 58 people killed and hundreds injured at a concert in Las Vegas, and 26 churchgoers killed and 20 injured at a church in Texas. Trump refuses to consider any gun controls.

20. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,“ he promised during the campaign. He hasn’t released his taxes.

December 22, 2017

There’s too much yelling these days, so we made this a silent video. (The only casualty was my arm, which ached for days afterward.) Hope you find it helpful. Best wishes for a 2018 that’s better for America than 2017 was.

December 18, 2017

The Republican tax plan to be voted on this week is likely to pass. “The American people have waited 31 long years to see our broken tax code overhauled,” the leaders of the Koch’s political network insisted in a letter to members of Congress, urging swift approval.

They added that the time had come to put “more money in the pockets of American families.”

Please. The Koch network doesn’t care a fig about the pockets of American families. It cares about the pockets of the Koch network.

It has poured money into almost every state in an effort to convince Americans that the tax cut will be good for them. Yet most Americans don’t believe it.

In counties that Trump won but Obama carried in 2012, only 17 percent say they expect to pay less in taxes, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 25 percent say they expected their family would actually pay higher taxes.

Most Americans know that the tax plan is payback for major Republican donors. Gary Cohn, Trump’s lead economic advisor, even conceded in an interview that “the most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.”

By passing it, Republican donors will save billions – paying a lower top tax rate, doubling the amount their heirs can receive tax-free, and treating themselves as “pass-through” businesses able to deduct 20 percent of their income (effectively allowing Trump to cut his tax rate in half, if and when he pays taxes).

They’ll make billions more as their stock portfolios soar because corporate taxes are slashed.

The biggest winners by far will be American oligarchs such as the Koch brothers; Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor; Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate; Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets football team and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune; and Carl Icahn, the activist investor.

The oligarchs are the richest of the richest 1 percent. They’ve poured hundreds of millions into the GOP and Trump. Half of all contributions to the first phase of the 2016 election came from just 158 families, along with the companies they own or control.

The giant tax cut has been their core demand from the start. They also want to slash regulations, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and cut everything else government does except for defense – including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

In return, they have agreed to finance Trump and the GOP, and mount expensive public relations campaigns that magnify their lies.

Trump has fulfilled his end of the bargain. He’s blinded much of his white working-class base to the reality of what’s happening by means of his racist, xenophobic rants and policies.

The American oligarchs couldn’t care less about what all this will cost America.

Within their gated estates and private jets, they’re well insulated from the hatefulness and divisiveness,

They don’t worry about whether Social Security or Medicare will be there for them in their retirement because they’ve put away huge fortunes.

Climate change doesn’t concern them because their estates are fully insured against hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.

They don’t care about public schools because their families don’t attend them. They don’t care about public transportation because they don’t use it. They don’t care about the poor because they don’t see them.

They don’t worry about the rising budget deficit because they borrow directly from global capital markets.

Truth to tell, they don’t even care that much about America because their personal and financial interests are global.

They are living in their own separate society, and they want Congress and the President to represent them, not the rest of us.

The Republican Party is their vehicle. Fox News is their voice. Trump is their champion. The new tax plan is their triumph.

But if polls showing most Americans against the tax cut are any guide, that triumph may be short lived. Americans are catching on.

The recent electoral results in Virginia and Alabama offer further evidence.

A tidal wave of public loathing is growing across the land – toward Trump, the GOP, and the oligarchs they serve; and to the deception, the wealth, and the power that underlies them.

That wave could crash in the midterm elections of 2018. If so, the current triumph of the oligarchs will be the start of their undoing.

December 17, 2017

Here are the 3 main Republican arguments in favor of the Republican tax plan, followed by the truth.

1. It will make American corporations competitive with foreign corporations, which are taxed at a lower rate.

Rubbish.

(1) American corporations now pay an effective rate (after taking deductions and tax credits) that’s just about the same as most foreign based corporations pay.

(2) Most of these other countries also impose a “Value Added Tax” on top of the corporate tax.

(3) When we cut our corporate rate from 35% to 20%, other nations will cut their corporate rates in order to be competitive with us – so we gain nothing anyway.

(4) Most big American corporations who benefit most from the Republican tax plan aren’t even “American.” Over 35 percent of their shareholders are foreign (which means that by cutting corporate taxes we’re giving a big tax cut to those foreign shareholders). 20 percent of their employees are foreign, while many Americans work for foreign-based corporations.

(5) The “competitiveness” of America depends on American workers, not on “American” corporations. But this tax plan will make it harder to finance public investments in education, health, and infrastructure, on which the future competitiveness of American workers depends.

(6) American corporations already have more money than they know what to do with. Their profits are at record levels. They’re using them to buy back their shares of stock, and raise executive pay. That’s what they’ll do with the additional $1 trillion they’ll receive in this tax cut.

***

2. With the tax cut, big corporations and the rich will invest and create more jobs.

Baloney.

(1) Job creation doesn’t trickle down. After Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cut taxes on the top, few jobs and little growth resulted. America cut taxes on corporations in 2004 in an attempt to get them to bring their profits home from abroad, and what happened? They didn’t invest. They just bought up more shares of their own stock, and increased executive pay.

(2) Companies expand and create jobs when there’s more demand for their goods and services. That demand comes from customers who have the money to buy what companies sell. Those customers are primarily the middle class and poor, who spend far more of their incomes than the rich. But this tax bill mostly benefits the rich.

(3) At a time when the richest 1 percent already have 40 percent of all the wealth in the country, it’s immoral to give them even more – especially when financed partly by 13 million low-income Americans who will lose their health coverage as a result of this tax plan (according to the Congressional Budget Office), and by subsequent cuts in safety-net programs necessitated by increasing the deficit by $1.5 trillion.

***

3. It will give small businesses an incentive to invest and create more jobs.

Untrue.

(1) At least 85 percent of small businesses earn so little they already pay the lowest corporate tax rate, which this plan doesn’t change.

(2) In fact, because the tax plan bestows much larger rewards on big businesses, they’ll have more ability to use predatory tactics to squeeze small firms and force them out of business.

***

Don’t let your Uncle Bob be fooled: Republicans are voting for this because their wealthy patrons demand it. Their tax plan will weaken our economy for years – reducing demand, widening inequality, and increasing the national debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

Shame on the greedy Republican backers who have engineered this. Shame on Trump and the Republicans who have lied to the public about its consequences.

December 16, 2017

Common sense and decency have prevailed in Alabama. It was a vote not just against sexual abuse but also against racism and against those who would ride roughshod over our democratic institutions.

Yes, the margin was small, and Roy Moore was the worst candidate Republicans could possibly have dredged up. But remember, this is Alabama – where Democrats are hated, where minority votes are suppressed, where Trump won overwhelmingly last November.

In the most Trumpian of all states, Trump has been delivered the most powerful repudiation to date. First it was Virginia; now, Alabama. I’d like to think this is a precursor of what’s to come next November – the beginning of the end of the nightmare.

Today Alabama demonstrated that America is better than Trump, and better than House and Senate Republicans who have jumped into the swamp Trump has created. Congratulations, Doug Jones. Congratulations, Alabama. Congratulations, America.

December 11, 2017

SLAPP stands for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” It is a lawsuit brought by big corporations intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the overwhelming costs of a legal defense until they’re forced to abandon their criticism or opposition. And it may be the biggest threat to the resistance you’ve never heard of.

Here’s an example: Resolute Forest Products, one of Canada’s largest logging and paper companies, has sued, in a U.S. court, environmental groups that have been campaigning to save Canada’s boreal forest.

Resolute based its lawsuit on a U.S. conspiracy and racketeering law (RICO) intended to ensnare mobsters. Resolute alleged that the environmental groups have been illegally conspiring to extort the company’s customers and to defraud their own donors.

The suit wasn’t designed to win in court. It was designed to distract and silence critics. This is punishment for speaking out. Thankfully, a federal court agrees and a judge just dismissed Resolute’s claims. But other corporate bullies are still trying to use this playbook.

Here’s another example: Remember the indigenous led movement at Standing Rock, when hundreds of nations and their allies came together and stood up against the destructive Dakota Access Pipeline?

In August, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind that pipeline, filed a similar RICO case against Greenpeace entities and two other defendants over Standing Rock. The suit accuses them of participating in a sprawling criminal conspiracy to disrupt business and defraud donors. The lawsuit even alleges they support eco-terrorism and engage in drug trafficking.

The lawsuit claims Greenpeace cost the company $300 million. Since RICO claims entitle plaintiffs to recover triple damages, the case potentially could cost Greenpeace $900 million. That would be the end of Greenpeace.

But, again, winning isn’t necessarily the goal of SLAPP suits. Just by filing the suits, Energy Transfer Partners and Resolute are trying to drain environmental groups of time, energy, and resources they need, so they can’t continue to fight to protect the environment.

Connect the dots, and consider the chilling effect SLAPP suits are having on any group seeking to protect public health, worker’s rights, and even our democracy.

Who’s behind all of this? Both the lawsuits I just mentioned were filed by Michael Bowe. He is also a member of Donald Trump’s personal legal team. Bowe has publicly stated that he’s in conversations with other corporations considering filing their own SLAPP lawsuits.

If the goal is to silence public-interest groups, the rest of us must speak out. Wealthy corporations must know they can’t SLAPP the public into silence.

December 09, 2017

Trump and congressional Republicans are engineering the largest corporate tax cut in history in order “to restore our competitive edge,” as Trump says.

Our competitive edge? Who’s us?

Most American corporations – especially big ones that would get most of the planned corporate tax cuts – have no particular allegiance to America. Their only allegiance is to their shareholders.

So restoring their “competitive edge” has little or nothing to do with helping American workers.

For years they’ve been cutting the jobs and wages of American workers in order to generate larger profits and higher share prices.

Some of these jobs have gone abroad or been outsourced to lower-paid contractors in America. Others have been automated. Most of the remaining jobs pay no more than they did four decades ago, adjusted for inflation.

When GM went public again in 2010 after being bailed out by American taxpayers, it boasted of making 43 percent of its cars in places where labor is less than $15 an hour – often outside the United States. And it got its American unions to agree that new hires would be paid half the wages and benefits of its old workers.

Capital is global. Big American corporations are “American” only because they’re headquartered and legally incorporated in the United States. But they could (and sometimes do) leave at a moment’s notice. They employ or contract with workers all over the world.

And they’re owned by shareholders all over the world.

According to research by the Tax Policy Center’s Steven Rosenthal, about 35 percent of stock in U.S. corporations is now held by foreign investors.

So when taxes of “American” corporations are cut – as the Trump-Republican tax bill seeks to do – foreign investors get a windfall.

That’s money that foreign investors would otherwise be paying into the U.S. Treasury.

By way of comparison, the combined tax cuts for families in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution in the 30 states won by President Donald Trump comes to just $39.4 billion. That’s far less than the House bill gives away to foreign investors.

I’m not blaming American corporations. They’re in business to make profits and maximize their share prices, not to serve America.

I’m blaming politicians like Trump and the Republicans who are trying to persuade Americans that tax cuts on American corporations will be good for Americans.

It’s different for many corporations headquartered in Europe or Canada. Big corporations headquartered there are far more responsible for the well-being of the people living in those nations. That’s mainly because labor unions there are typically stronger there than they are here – able to exert pressure both at the company level and nationally.

As a result, American corporations distribute a smaller share of their earnings to their workers than do European or Canadian-based corporations. And top American executives make far more money than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

Governments in other rich nations often devise laws through bargains involving big corporations and organized labor. This process further binds their corporations to their nations.

But in America, lawmakers respond almost exclusively to the demands of big corporations and of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. Meanwhile, unions are weak here, and “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” according to researchers.

Which is one reason why most Europeans and Canadians receive essentially free health care, generous unemployment benefits, paid medical leave, and an average of five weeks paid vacation.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that even though U.S. economy is doing well by most measures, and American-based corporations are overflowing with profits, the benefits are not trickling down to most Americans.

Given the dominance of American corporations on American politics, combined with their singular concern for share prices rather than the well-being of Americans, it’s folly to think they’ll turn tax cuts into good American jobs.

The tax bills big corporations are pushing through Congress are designed for one thing: to boost their share prices, not to boost the vast majority of Americans.

December 02, 2017

It’s often thought that Democrats care about fairness and not economic growth, while Republicans care about growth even at the cost of some fairness.

Rubbish. Growth and fairness aren’t opposites. In reality, Democrats are the party of economic growth and fairness. Republicans are the party of neither.

The only way to grow the economy is by investing in the education, healthcare, and infrastructure that average Americans need in order to be more productive. Growth doesn’t “trickle down.” It rises up.

Consider the two biggest legislative initiatives over past decade – the Affordable Care Act, achieved without a single Republican vote, and the current Trump-Republican tax overhaul, speeding ahead without a single Democrat.

The ACA extends coverage to 21 million mostly lower-income Americans, including millions of children.

It’s largely paid for by two tax increases on the rich – a 3.8 percent increase on their capital gains taxes and other investment-related income, and a 0.9 percent surcharge on their Medicare taxes. Those tax increases are a major reason why Republicans have wanted to repeal it.

But the ACA isn’t just about fairness. Healthier Americans are also more productive workers. Children who receive health care are better learners. The Act thereby fuels economic growth and widens prosperity.

Republicans say their tax overhaul will promote growth by increasing the profits of American corporations and investors. This is trickle-down nonsense.

Every major study (including Congress’s own Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation) finds that its benefits would go mainly to big corporations and the wealthy.

November 27, 2017

One of the most dangerous consequences of this awful period in American life is the denigration of the truth, and of institutions and people who tell it.

There are two kinds of liars – fools and knaves. Fools lie because they don’t know the truth. Knaves lie because they intend to mislead.

Trump is both, because he doesn’t even care enough about the truth to find out what it is. He’ll say whatever he thinks will get people to believe what he wants them to believe.

What about people like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s point person on the Republican tax bills now making their way through Congress?

Mnuchin continues to insist that the legislation puts a higher tax burden on people earning more than $1 million a year, and reduce taxes on everyone else. “I can tell you that virtually everybody in the middle class will get a tax cut, and will get a significant tax cut,” Mnuchin says repeatedly.

But the prestigious Tax Policy Center concludes that by 2025, almost all of the benefits of both bills will have gone to the richest 1 percent, while upper-middle-class payers will pay higher taxes and those at the lower levels will receive only modest benefits.

So is Mnuchin a fool? His career before he became Treasury Secretary doesn’t suggest so. He graduated from Yale, and worked for seventeen years for investment bank Goldman Sachs.

November 22, 2017

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are being denied the right to vote because they are poor.

In nine states, Republican legislators have enacted laws that disenfranchise anyone with outstanding legal fees or court fines. For example, in Alabama more than 100,000 people who owe money – roughly 3 percent of the state’s voting-age population – have been struck from voting rolls.

This is unconstitutional. In 1964, the 24th amendment abolished the poll tax, a Jim Crow tactic used to bar poor blacks from voting.

These new laws are a modern reincarnation of that unconstitutional system, disproportionately disenfranchising people of color.

Income and wealth should have no bearing on the right to vote. Many Americans are struggling to make ends meet. But they still have a constitutional right to make their voices heard.

Preventing people from voting because they owe legal fees or court fines muzzle low-income Americans at a time in our nation’s history when the rich have more political power than ever.

These state laws are another form of voter suppression – like gerrymandering, voter ID requirements, and bars on anyone with felony convictions from voting.

November 19, 2017

Why are so many women now speaking out about the sexual abuses they’ve experienced for years? Is there anything unique about the time we’re now living through that has encouraged them to end their silence?

I can’t help think their decisions are part of something that’s happening throughout much of American society right now – a backlash against what has been the growing domination of America by powerful and wealthy men (and a few women) who came to believe they can do whatever they want to do, to whomever they choose.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy,” said Donald Trump in the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape.

Sexual assault is one obvious assertion of dominance. Other forms include economic bullying and the stoking of bigotry to gain political power.

Trump epitomizes it all. As a businessman he stiffed contractors, used bankruptcy to avoid paying creditors, and wielded lawsuits to threaten critics. As a politician he gained traction by alleging Obama was born in Africa, Mexicans are rapists and murders, and Muslims must be kept out of America.

But the days of Trump and the bullying he represents are numbered. Soon after the 2016 election, hundreds of thousands of women marched against Trump, and the Resistance was born.

On November 7, Virginia Republican candidate Ed Gillespie’s hate-filled Trump-style campaign for governor of Virginia collapsed in a nearly nine-point defeat to Ralph Northam. Democrats swept statewide elections in Virginia, won the New Jersey governor’s race, and achieved other victories across the nation.

One of the consequences of Trump’s presidency has been a sharp increase in the number of female candidates and winners. More than 20,000 women have declared themselves candidates for public office so far, according to Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List – an unprecedented number.

This should be the Democrat’s hour, especially if they stand up against the bullies of America and stand for the millions who have been humiliated, intimidated, disenfranchised, and disempowered.

Democrats will need to gain 24 seats to take control of the House in 2018. It will be difficult, given the amount of gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression imposed by Republican legislatures.

Nevertheless, last month Cook Political Report shifted 12 House districts in favor of Democrats, a year ahead of the 2018 midterms. A poll released at the beginning of November showed Democrats with an 11-point lead over Republicans on a generic House ballot. The Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 51 percent of registered voters said they would vote for the Democrat in their district, while 40 percent said they would vote for the Republican.

The revolt against Trump is a backlash against bullying in all its forms. Powerful and wealthy men who have felt free to impose their will on others, regardless of the pain they cause, may be in for a rude awakening.

They include the 45Committee, founded by billionaire casino oligarch Sheldon Adelson and Todd Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs; and the Koch Brothers’ groups, Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners.

They’re not doing this out of love of America. They’re doing it out of love of money.

How do you think they got so wealthy in the first place?

As more of the nation’s wealth has shifted to the top over the past three decades, major recipients have poured some of it into politics – buying themselves tax cuts, special subsidies, bailouts, lenient antitrust enforcement, favorable bankruptcy rules, extended intellectual property protection, and other laws that add to their wealth.

All of which have given them more clout to get additional legal changes that enlarge their wealth even more.

Forty years ago, the estate tax was paid by 139,000 estates, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. By 2000, it was paid by 52,000. This year it will be paid by just 5,500 estates. Under the House tax plan, it will be eliminated altogether.

Why do Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of every other advanced economy? Because Big Pharma has altered the laws in its favor. Why do we pay more for internet service than most other nations? Big cable’s political clout. Why can payday lenders get away with payday robbery? The political heft of big banks.

Multiply these examples across the economy and you get a huge hidden upward redistribution from the paychecks of average working people and the poor to top executives and investors. (I explain this in detail in the documentary “Saving Capitalism,” airing next week on Netflix.)

All this is terrible for the American economy.

More and better jobs depend on increasing demand for goods and services. This must come from the middle class and poor because the rich spend a far smaller share of their after-tax income.

Yet the middle class and poor have steadily lost purchasing power. Partly as a result, a relatively low share of the nation’s working-age population is employed today and the wages of the typical worker have been stuck in the mud.

The Republican tax plan will make all this worse by burdening the middle class and the poor even more.

A slew of analyses, including Congress’s own Joint Committee on Taxation, show that the GOP plan will raise taxes on many middle-class families.

It will also require cuts in government programs that middle and lower-income Americans depend on, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

And the plan will almost certainly explode the national debt, eventually causing many middle class and poor families to pay higher interest on their auto loans, mortgages, and credit cards.

I don’t care whether the top executives of big corporations, Wall Street moguls, and heirs to vast fortunes salute the flag and stand for the national anthem.

But they enjoy all the advantages of being American. Most couldn’t have got to where they are in any other country.

They have a patriotic duty to take on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going. And Trump and his enablers in Congress have a patriotic responsibility to make them.

November 07, 2017

It seems like forever, but it was just one year ago that Donald Trump was elected president. So what have we learned about the presidency and who is running the country?

1. The first big thing we’ve learned is that Trump is not really the president of the United States – because he’s not governing.

A president who’s governing doesn’t blast his Attorney General for doing his duty and recusing himself from an FBI investigation of the president.

A president who’s governing doesn’t leave the top echelons of departments and agencies empty for almost a year.

He doesn’t publicly tell his Secretary of State he’s wasting time trying to open relations with North Korea. Any president with the slightest interest in governing would already know and approve of what his Secretary of State was doing.

He doesn’t fire half his key White House staff in the first nine months, creating utter chaos.

A president who is governing works with his cabinet and staff to develop policy. He doesn’t just tweet new public policy out of the blue – for example, that transgender people can’t serve in the military. His Secretary of Defense is likely to have some thoughts on the matter – and if not consulted might decide to ignore the tweet.

He doesn’t just decide to withdraw from the Paris Accord without any reason or analysis.

A president who is governing works with Congress. He doesn’t just punt to Congress hard decisions – as he did with DACA, the Iran nuclear deal, insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, and details of his tax plan.

He doesn’t tell a crowd of supporters that he’s ended the Clean Power Plan – “Did you see what I did to that? Boom, gone” – when any such repeal requires a legal process, and must then withstand court challenges.

Instead of governing, Donald Trump has been insulting, throwing tantrums, and getting even:

Equating white supremacists with people who protest against them. Questioning the patriotism of NFL players who are peacefully protesting police violence and racism.

Making nasty remarks about journalists, about his predecessor as president, his political opponent in the last election, national heroes like Congressman John Lewis and Senator John McCain, even the mayor of San Juan Puerto Rico.

Or he’s busy lying and then covering up the lies. Claiming he would have won the popular vote if millions hadn’t voted fraudulently for his opponent – without a shred of evidence to support his claim, and then setting up a fraudulent commission to find the evidence.

Or firing the head of the FBI who wouldn’t promise to be more loyal to him than to the American public.

A president’s job is to govern. Trump doesn’t know how to govern, or apparently doesn’t care. So, logically, he’s not President.

November 06, 2017

In a radio interview on Thursday, Trump said “the saddest thing is, because I am the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing.”

Trump then asked, referring to the Department and the FBI, “why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her dossier?”

In a series of tweets Friday morning, Trump directly called on the Justice Department and the FBI to “do what is right and proper” by launching criminal probes of Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s obvious aim was to deflect attention from special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of his campaign, and of the indictments issued against his campaign aides.

But by calling on the Justice Department to investigate Hillary Clinton, and lamenting he cannot do “the kind of things I would love to be doing,” Trump crossed a particularly dangerous line.

In a democracy bound by the rule of law, presidents do not prosecute their political opponents. Nor, until now, have they tried to stir up public anger toward their former opponents.

Our democratic system of government depends on presidents putting that system above their own partisan aims.

As Harvard political scientist Archon Fung has noted, once an election is over, candidates’ graciousness to one another is an important demonstration of their commitment to the democratic system over the specific outcomes they fought to achieve.

This helps reestablish civility and social cohesion. It reminds the public that our allegiance is not toward a particular person or party but to our system of government.

Think of Al Gore’s concession speech to George W. Bush in 2000, after five weeks of a bitterly contested election and just one day after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Bush. “I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country.”

Gore publicly bowed to the institutions of our democracy. “Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it … And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”

Bush’s response to Gore was no less gracious: “Vice president Gore and I put our hearts and hopes into our campaigns; we both gave it our all. We shared similar emotions. I understand how difficult this moment must be for vice president Gore and his family. He has a distinguished record of service to our country as a congressman, a senator and as vice president.”

Many voters continued to doubt the legitimacy of Bush’s victory, but there was no social unrest, no civil war. Americans didn’t retreat into warring tribes.

Think of what might have occurred if Gore had bitterly accused Bush of winning fraudulently, and blamed the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court for siding with Bush for partisan reasons.

Think of what might have happened if, during his campaign, Bush had promised to put Gore in jail for various improprieties, and then, after he won, called on the Justice Department and the FBI to launch a criminal investigation of Gore.

These statements – close to ones that Donald Trump has actually made – might have imperiled the political stability of the nation.

Instead, Gore and Bush made the same moral choice their predecessors made at the end of every previous American presidential election, and for the same reason.

They understood that the demonstrations of respect for each other and for the Constitution confirmed the nation’s commitment to our system of government. This was far more important than their own losses or wins.

Donald Trump has no such concern.

This is the essence of Trump’s failure as president – not that he has chosen one set of policies over another, or has lied repeatedly and chronically, or even that he has behaved in childish and vindictive ways unbecoming a president.

It is that he has sacrificed the processes and institutions of American democracy to achieve his own selfish ends.

By saying and doing whatever he believes it takes for him to come out on top, Donald Trump has abused the trust we place in a president to preserve and protect the nation’s capacity for self-government.

November 02, 2017

The goal of Trump and the Republican leaders is to pull off a giant redistribution of over $1 trillion from the middle-class, working-class, and poor to the rich, who are already richer than ever.

They’re selling this to the public with a false claim that the middle-class will benefit from their tax cut plan. It’s a gigantic Trojan horse.

For most Americans, the proposed tax cuts are tiny and temporary. That’s right – temporary. They will shrink in just a few years. And some middle class Americans will actually get a tax increase.

Meanwhile, the top 1 percent will get a gigantic tax cut. The Tax Policy Center estimates that the current plan will save the bottom 80 percent between $50 and $450 in taxes per year, but that it saves each person in the top 1 percent an average of $129,000 a year. For people at the very top, like Trump himself, the tax cuts are humongous. And the corporations they own will also get a massive tax cut.

Republicans say economic “growth” will pay for the tax cuts, so there’s no need to cut social programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

But Republicans have just passed a budget that would cut nearly $1.5 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid to pay for these tax cuts. Pell Grants, housing assistance, and even cancer research are also on the chopping block.

Now, they say we shouldn’t take their budget resolution seriously. It was just a device to get the tax bill through the Senate with 51 votes.

But once these tax cuts are passed, the budget deficit will explode. The Tax Policy Center predicts that it will cut federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

When that happens, the only way out of the crisis will be something dramatic – exactly the cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and maybe even Social Security – that Republicans have wanted for years.

By this time, any talk of raising taxes on the rich will be dismissed.

Using the promise of middle-class tax cuts as a Trojan horse for a tax windfall for the rich and deep spending cuts is a tactic dating back to the Reagan administration.

But none of this seems to bother Republicans in Congress, except for a handful of Senators who won’t be running again. That’s because congressional Republicans are concentrating their efforts on pulling off the giant heist for their rich patrons.

They want to move quickly so no one notices – passing the tax cut before Christmas, with no hearings and minimal debate.

If the plot succeeds, most Americans will be robbed in three ways.

First, they’ll lose tax deductions they rely on – such as the deduction on earnings they put into tax-deferred savings in 401k plans. Some 55 million Americans now rely on 401(k) plans to save for retirement.

They’ll also lose the deduction for what they pay in state and local taxes. More than half of this deduction now goes to taxpayers with incomes of less than $200,000.

Republicans say the middle class will come out just fine because they’ll get a larger standard deduction. Not true. The average American’s tax bill will rise because the deductions they’ll lose will total more than the higher standard deduction Republicans are proposing.

Second, most Americans will lose government services that will have to be eliminated in order to pay for the giant tax cut – including, very likely, some Medicare and Medicaid.

About $1.5 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts were quietly included in the budget resolution Republicans just passed, in order to get their tax bill through the Senate with just 51 votes. (No one paid much attention because Trump was attacking grieving combat widows.)

Third, most Americans will have to pay higher interest on their car and mortgage loans and other money they borrow, because the huge tax cut will explode the national debt.

That debt is now around $20 trillion, or 70 percent of the total economy. If it goes much higher, it will crowd out borrowing and force interest rates upward.

Putting all this together, the theft would be the largest redistribution from the bottom 90 percent to the richest 1 percent in history.

Republican’s biggest fear is that word of the heist will leak out to the public, and their tax bill will be defeated by a handful of Senate Republican holdouts who feel the public pressure.

That’s exactly what happened with their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The GOP’s big-money patrons pushed for repeal not because they had any principled objection to the Act, but because they didn’t want to fork over $144 billion in taxes on incomes over $1 million to pay for the Act over the next decade.

In the end, Republicans couldn’t get away with it because Americans learned that more than 23 million people would lose their health coverage, and Medicaid would also be on the chopping block.

Trump was willing to distract the public’s attention to give congressional Republicans a shot at repeal, but the moment the public started catching on he blew their cover. After the Congressional Budget Office announced the consequences of the Republican health bill, Trump called it “mean.”

He could do the same with the tax bill. He almost has. When word leaked out last week that Republicans were planning to limit 401(k) deductions, Trump tweeted that it wouldn’t happen (and then backtracked on his tweet).

The moneyed interests who run the GOP depend on the Trump bomb to divert attention from their huge heist. Their challenge is to make sure the bomb doesn’t go off in the wrong direction.

October 26, 2017

AMERICA NOW HAS 6 POLITICAL PARTIES

The old Democratic and Republican parties are exploding. When you take a closer look, America actually has six political parties right now:

1. Establishment Republicans, consisting of large corporations, Wall Street, and major GOP funders. Their goal is to have their taxes cut.

2. Anti-establishment Republicans, consisting of Tea Partiers, the Freedom Caucus, and libertarians. Their goal is to have a smaller government with shrinking deficits and debts. Many of them also want to get Big Money out of politics and end crony capitalism.

3. Social conservative Republicans – evangelicals and rural Southern whites. They want America to return to what they call “Christian” values.

4. Establishment Democrats – corporate and Wall Street executives and upper middle-class professionals. They’d also like a tax cut, but they believe in equal rights.

5. Anti-establishment Democrats – younger, grassroots movement types, and progressives who still call themselves Democrats. Their biggest issues are widening inequality, racism, sexism, and climate change. They also want to get Big Money out of politics and they reject crony capitalism.

6. The sixth party is Trump. This party consists of Donald J. Trump and his fanatical followers. Trump’s goal is to get more money for himself, get more power for himself, get more attention to himself, and get even.

Whoever can put together elements of a governing coalition among these six parties will win future elections.

One possibility is a coalition of anti-establishment Democrats who want to get big money out of politics and who reject crony capitalism, and anti-establishement Republicans who want the same.

The other possible coalition is establishment Democrats who want their taxes cut and establishment Republicans who want the same.

October 23, 2017

The largest corporations and richest people in America – who donated billions of dollars to Republican candidates the House and Senate in the 2106 election – appear on the way to getting what they paid for: a giant tax cut.

The New York Times reports that business groups are meeting frequently with key Republicans in order to shape the tax bill, whose details remain secret.

Speed and secrecy are critical. The quicker Republicans get this done, and without hearings, the less likely will the rest of the country discover how much it will cost in foregone Medicaid and Medicare or ballooning budget deficits.

Donald Trump has been trashing democratic institutions – the independence of the press, judges who disagree with him, uncooperative legislators – while raking in money off his presidency. But don’t lose sight of the larger attack on our democracy that was underway even before Trump was elected: A flood of big money into politics.

Lest you conclude it’s only Republicans who have been pocketing big bucks in exchange for political favors, consider what Big Tech – the industry that’s mostly bankrolled Democrats – is up to.

It’s mobilizing an army of lobbyists and lawyers – including senior advisors to Hillary Clinton’s campaign – to help scuttle a proposed law requiring Google, Facebook, and other major Internet companies to disclose who is purchasing their online political advertising.

After revelations that Russian-linked operatives bought deceptive ads in the run-up to the 2016 election, you’d think this would be a no-brainer. But never underestimate the power of big money, whichever side of the aisle it’s aimed at.

Often, it’s both sides. Last week The Washington Post and “60 Minutes” reported that Big Pharma contributed close to $1.5 million to Democrats as well as Republicans in order to secure enactment of the so-called “Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016.”

This shameful law weakened the Drug Enforcement Authority’s power to stop prescription opioids from being shipped to pharmacies and doctors suspected of taking bribes to distribute them – a major cause of the opioid crisis. Last year, Americans got 236 million opioid prescriptions, the equivalent of one bottle for every adult.

Overwhelming majorities of House and Senate Democrats voted for the bill, as well as Republicans, and President Obama signed it into law.

There you have it, folks. Big money is buying giant tax cuts, allowing Russia to interfere in future elections, and killing Americans. That’s just the tip of the corrupt iceberg that’s sinking our democracy.

Republicans may be taking more big money, but both parties have been raking it in.

Average Americans know exactly what’s going on.

I just returned from several days in Kentucky and Tennessee, both of which voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

A number of Trump voters told me they voted for him because they wanted someone who’d shake up Washington, drain the swamp, and get rid of crony capitalism. They saw Hillary Clinton as part of the problem.

These people aren’t white nationalists. They’re decent folks who just want a government that’s not of, by, and for the moneyed interests.

Many are now suffering buyer’s remorse. They recognize Trump has sold his administration to corporate lobbyists and Wall Street. “He conned us,” was the most polite response I heard.

The big money that’s taken over American politics in recent years has created the biggest political backlash in postwar American history – inside both parties.

It’s splitting the Republican Party between its large corporate patrons and a base that detests big corporations and Wall Street.

Trump is trying to straddle both by pretending he’s a champion of the working class while pushing for giant tax cuts. But if my free-floating focus group in Kentucky and Tennessee is any indication, the base is starting to see through it.

Which you might think creates a huge opportunity for Democrats heading into the 2018 midterms and the presidential election of 2020.

Think again. Much of the official Democratic Party is still in denial, continuing to debate whether it should be on the proverbial “left” or move to the “middle.”

But when it comes to getting big money out of politics and ending crony capitalism, there’s no right or left, and certainly no middle. There’s just democracy or oligarchy.

Democrats should be fighting for commonsense steps to reclaim our democracy from the moneyed interests – public financing of elections, full disclosure of all sources of political funding, an end to revolving door between government and business, and attempts to reverse the bonkers Supreme Court decision “Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.”

For that matter, Republicans should be fighting for these, too.

Here's a wild idea. What if the anti-establishment wings of both parties came together in a pro-democracy coalition to get big money out of politics?

October 20, 2017

By repealing DACA – Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals – Trump has endangered both these young immigrants and the economic security of America.

In 2012, the Obama administration created DACA as a temporary way to address the needs of young people who came to America as infants or toddlers, and know no other country.

To apply and qualify for DACA, these young people had to risk entering the system by giving their identifying information. Once approved, they were granted two years of “deferred action” on deportation, with the promise that they could reapply every two years indefinitely.

This allowed “dreamers” to go to college, get a job, and pay taxes without fear of deportation. DACA was never perfect, but for 800,000 immigrant youth it meant freedom from fear and an opportunity to fully contribute to the country they were raised in.

But now these young people are threatened with deportation.

For no reason. These young people are not taking jobs away from native-born Americans. Even the conservative Cato Institute has said that the economic cost of cancelling DACA would be $200 billion over ten years. And that’s just direct costs. The Center for American Progress estimates that if we lost these young workers the U.S. gross domestic product would shrink by $433 billion over the next decade.

The moral case is even more compelling than the economic one.

These kids grew up in America. To enter the DACA program they already had to step forward and show that they were contributing to their communities and then prove it again every two years to stay in the program. It is immoral to now put them in the crosshairs of deportation.

This is just the latest effort by Trump to play to his base and divide us, but we must not allow that. Americans of all races and creeds must push congress to pass the Dream Act, and allow these young people to become American citizens – without the Act being a bargaining chip for more border security or anything else.

These DACA young people are our neighbors, our colleagues, and our classmates. They represent the the best of the dream that my parents and most of our ancestors had when they came to America: To make a better life for themselves, and for their kids. Trump’s attempt to divide us and fuel our differences along racial and ethnic lines is an attack on the America I believe in, and we must not let it stand.

That’s why the DACA fight is my fight, and why I stand with the dreamers – and I hope you will too.

October 13, 2017

Last week, Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview with the New York Times that Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

Corker said he was concerned about Trump. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation,” Corker said, adding that “the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here … the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

Corker’s interview was followed by a report from Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, who wrote that the situation has gotten so out of control that Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis have discussed ways to stop Trump should he order a nuclear attack. Kelly has tried to keep Trump focused by intercepting outside phone calls to the White House and restricting access to the Oval Office. Many of Trump’s advisors believe he is “unstable” and “unravelling” quickly.

Is Trump really unraveling? Are Republican leaders ready to pull the plug? I phoned an old friend, a Republican former member of Congress who keeps up with what’s going on. I scribbled notes as he talked:

Me: So what’s up? Is Corker alone, or are others also ready to call it quits with Trump?

He: But now it’s personal. It started with the Sessions stuff. Jeff was as loyal as they come. Trump’s crapping on him was like kicking your puppy. And then, you know, him beating up on Mitch for the Obamacare fiasco. And going after Flake and the others.

Me: So they’re pissed off?

He: Not just that. I mean, they have thick hides. The personal stuff got them to notice all the other things. The wild stuff, like those threats to North Korea. Tillerson would leave tomorrow if he wasn’t so worried Trump would go nuclear, literally.

Me: You think Trump is really thinking nuclear war?

He: Who knows what’s in his head? But I can tell you this. He’s not listening to anyone. Not a soul. He’s got the nuclear codes and, well, it scares the hell out of me. It’s starting to scare all of them. That’s really why Bob spoke up.

Me: So what could they do? I mean, even if the whole Republican leadership was willing to say publicly he’s unfit to serve, what then?

He: Bingo! The emperor has no clothes. It’s a signal to everyone they can bail. Have to bail to save their skins. I mean, Trump could be the end of the whole goddam Republican party.

Me: If he starts a nuclear war, that could be the end of everything.

He: Yeah, right. So when they start bailing on him, the stage is set.

Me: For what?

He: Impeachment. 25th amendment.

Me: You think Republicans would go that far?

He: Not yet. Here’s the thing. They really want to get this tax bill through. That’s all they have going for them. They don’t want to face voters in ’18 or ’20 without something to show for it. They’re just praying Trump doesn’t do something really, really stupid before the tax bill.

Me: Like a nuclear war?

He: Look, all I can tell you is many of the people I talk with are getting freaked out. It’s not as if there’s any careful strategizing going on. Not like, well, do we balance the tax bill against nuclear war? No, no. They’re worried as hell. They’re also worried about Trump crazies, all the ignoramuses he’s stirred up. I mean, Roy Moore? How many more of them do you need to destroy the party?

Me: So what’s gonna happen?

He: You got me. I’m just glad I’m not there anymore. Trump’s not just a moron. He’s a despicable human being. And he’s getting crazier. Paranoid. Unhinged. Everyone knows it. I mean, we’re in shit up to our eyeballs with this guy.

October 11, 2017

Trump and conservatives in Congress are planning a big tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. To justify it they’re using the oldest song in their playbook, claiming tax cuts on the rich will trickle down to working families in the form of stronger economic growth.

Baloney. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. Just look at the evidence:

1. Clinton’s tax increase on the rich hardly stalled the economy. In 1993, Bill Clinton raised taxes on top earners from 31 percent to 39.6 percent. Conservatives predicted economic disaster. Instead, the economy created 23 million jobs and the economy grew for 8 straight years in what was then the longest expansion in history. The federal budget went into surplus.

2. George W. Bush’s big tax cuts for the rich didn’t grow the economy. In 2001and 2003, George W. Bush lowered the top tax rate to 35 percent while also cutting top rates on capital gains and dividends. Conservative supply-siders predicted an economic boom. Instead, the economy barely grew at all, and then in 2008 it collapsed. Meanwhile, the federal deficit ballooned.

3. Obama’s tax hike on the rich didn’t slow the economy. At the end of 2012, President Obama struck a deal to restore the 39.6 percent top tax rate and raise tax rates on capital gains and dividends. Once again, supply-side conservatives predicted doom. Instead, the economy grew steadily, and the expansion is still continuing.

4. The Reagan recovery of the early 1980s wasn’t driven by Reagan’s tax cut. Conservative supply-siders point to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. But the so-called Reagan recovery of the early 1980s was driven by low interest rates and big increase in government spending.

5. Kansas cut taxes on the rich and is a basket case. California raised them and is thriving. In 2012, Kansas slashed taxes on top earners and business owners, while California raised taxes on top earners to the highest state rate in the nation. Since then, California has had among the strongest economic growth of any state, while Kansas has fallen behind most other states.

So don’t fall for supply-side, trickle-down nonsense. Lower taxes on the rich don’t generate growth and jobs. They only make the rich even richer, at a time of raging inequality, and they cause bigger budget deficits.

[*Our thanks to Alexandra Thornton and Seth Hanlon from the Center for American Progress]

October 10, 2017

Donald Trump weighed in on the scandal engulfing movie mogul and Democratic funder Harvey Weinstein, accused by multiple women of sexual harassment (Weinstein has been fired from his company). “I’ve know Harvey Weinstein a long time. I’m not at all surprised to see it,” Trump said.

Trump was subsequently asked by CNN’s Elizabeth’s Landers how Weinstein’s conduct differed from the conduct Trump bragged about on the “Access Hollywood” tape, where he said “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Trump responded that the tape was just “locker-room talk.”

Rubbish. It wasn’t just “locker-room talk.” At least 15 women have publicly accused Trump of sexual harassment and assault, and People Magazine Natasha Stoynoff has six independent witnesses to back up her allegation that Trump “pushed her against a wall, shoved his tongue in her mouth, and told her they were going to have an affair.”

Trump is actively assaulting women in other ways. The Trump administration’s Education Department has moved to make it harder for women at universities to prove sexual harassment. Trump’s Health and Human Services Department has made it harder for women to get contraceptives. Trump has nominated 32 men and just one woman to become U.S. Attorneys. Trump’s 2018 budget calls for a 93 percent cut in funding for federal programs that aid survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.

Trump and Weinstein are both sexual harassers and predators. But Trump is also president of the United States. That makes him even more dangerous to women.

October 08, 2017

California lawmakers have just passed “sanctuary state” legislation – the first state since Oregon, which 30 years ago passed a law preventing state agencies from targeting undocumented immigrants solely because of their illegal status.

Other states should follow California’s and Oregon’s lead.

Since January, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered immigration authorities to target “public safety” threats, federal arrests of undocumented immigrants have increased by over 37 percent. California is home to an estimated 2.3 million unauthorized immigrants.

California’s law limits the authority of state and local law enforcers to communicate with federal immigration authorities, and prevents officers from questioning or holding people depending on their immigration status or immigration violations. But it still allows federal immigration authorities to enter county jails to question immigrants, and allow police and sheriffs to share information on people who have been convicted of serious crimes.

This is a fair balance. Sanctuary protections like these make sense because:

1. Under them, undocumented immigrants are more likely to come forth with information about crime when doing so won’t put them at risk of deportation. This improves public safety and builds trusts with law enforcement.

2. By contrast, turning state and local police into immigration agents invites more crime because it diverts limited time and resources to rounding up undocumented immigrants.

3. Undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens, so it makes even less sense for local and state police to spend their precious time and resources rounding them up.

4. A dragnet aimed at finding and deporting all of America’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants is cruel, costly, and contemptible. It turns this country into more of a police state, breaks up families, and hurts the economy.

We must resist Jeff Sessions and his dragnet. Help make your state a sanctuary.

October 07, 2017

I can understand why you feel Washington is a place of “petty nonsense,” as you said Wednesday when you called a news conference to rebut charges that you called Trump a moron last summer after a meeting of national security officials at the Pentagon.

I’m also reasonably sure you called him a moron, which doesn’t make Washington any less petty. You probably called him a moron because almost all of us out here in the rest of America routinely call him that.

But you’re right: There are far more important issues than the epithet you likely used to describe your boss.

On the other hand, your calling him a moron wouldn’t itself have mushroomed into a headline issue – even in petty Washington – if there weren’t deep concerns about the President’s state of mind to begin with.

I bet every cabinet secretary has from time to time called his boss a moron. I was a cabinet secretary once, and although I don’t recall ever saying Bill Clinton was a moron, I might have thought it, especially when I found out about Monica Lewinsky. But Bill Clinton was no moron.

The reason your moronic comment about Trump made the headlines is that Trump really is a moron, in the sense you probably meant it: He’s impulsive, mercurial, often cruel, and pathologically narcissistic. Some psychologists who have studied his behavior have concluded he’s a sociopath.

Washington is petty, but it’s not nonsensical. It latches on to gaffes only when they reveal something important. As journalist Michael Kinsley once said, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”

Face it. You are Secretary of State – the nation’s chief diplomat – under a president who’s dangerously nuts.

Last weekend, for example, Trump publicly said you were wasting your time trying to open talks with North Korea. Does he have a better idea? Any halfway rational president would ask his Secretary of State to try to talk with Kim Jong-Un.

And there’s Iran. You and Defense Secretary James Mattis have both stated the nuclear agreement should be retained. That, too, is only rational. The International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran has been honoring the agreement. Without it, Iran would restart its nuclear program.

But Trump is on the verge of decertifying the agreement in order to save face (in the 2016 campaign he called it an “embarrassment to America”) and further puncture Barack Obama’s legacy. His narcissism is endangering the world.

You tried to mediate the dispute between Qatar and its Arab neighbors. That, too, was the reasonable thing to do.

But then Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner sided with the United Arab Emirates, where they have business interests. Less than one hour after you called for a “calm and thoughtful dialogue” between Qatar and its neighbors, Trump blasted Qatar for financing terrorism. That was also nuts.

You are rightly appalled at Trump’s behavior. I can understand why you distanced yourself when Trump blamed “both sides” for violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And why you were horrified when Trump gave a wildly partisan speech to the Boy Scouts of America, which you once headed.

Given all this, I’m not surprised to hear that you’ve talked about resigning, but that Mattis and John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, have talked you out of it.

I urge you not to resign. America and the world need sane voices speaking into the ear of our Narcissist-in-Chief.

As Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee said recently, it’s you, Mattis, and Kelly who “help separate our country from chaos.” I don’t think Corker was referring to chaos abroad.

Let Trump fire you if he wants to. That would further reveal what a moron he is.

But if you really did want to serve the best interests of this nation, there’s another option you might want to consider.

Quietly meet with Mattis, Kelly, and Vice President Pence. Come up with a plan for getting most of the cabinet to join in a letter to Congress saying Trump is unable to discharge the duties of his office.

October 01, 2017

Announcement: Donald Trump is no longer the president of the United States.

Oh sure, he has the title and he has the bully pulpit – from which he’s bullying everyone from NBA players to people protesting white supremacists to DACA kids.

But he’s not actively governing the United States. That work is happening elsewhere – in Congress, the courts, the Fed, the career civil service, lobbyists, and in the states. Or it’s not happening at all.

It’s not just that Trump lost the epic battle to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Trump never understood the Affordable Care Act to begin with, and played no part in developing Republican alternatives.

The budget Trump submitted to Congress in March was dead on arrival. House Republicans ignored Trump’s request for $54 billion in cuts to departments and agencies and decided instead to cut non-defense spending by just $5 billion, and explode the defense budget.

The 9-page tax plan congressional Republicans and Trump unveiled last week only vaguely resembles Trump’s original tax proposal from April, and all the important decisions have been left to the tax-writing committees of Congress.

Trump’s relations with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan have become so strained they have no interest in looping him into policies before they have to.

Meanwhile, Trump has run out of Obama executive orders he can declare void. Major regulations, such as the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, can’t just be repealed. They have to go through a legal process that could take years.

Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of this. He told a cheering crowd in Alabama recently that he had ended the Clean Power Plan by executive order. “Did you see what I did to that? Boom, gone.”

Nope. The EPA will soon reveal its strategy for reversing the Plan, but whatever it is, environmental groups are almost certain to appeal it in the courts. Big businesses and utilities, fearing that the courts may rule against the administration, are lobbying the EPA to come up with a replacement rather than try to eliminate the Plan altogether.

September 30, 2017

Trump and Republicans are trying to sell you the idea that American corporations need a tax cut in order to be competitive. That’s rubbish. Here are 6 reasons why:

First, American corporations don’t need it in order to be competitive internationally. After tax credits and deductions, their effective tax rate is just about the same as paid by corporations in most of our major trading partners, according to the U.S. Treasury.

Second, American corporations are making more money than ever. Their after-tax profits are a higher share of the total economy than ever. American corporations earn nearly half of all global profits, even though the U.S. economy is about a fifth the size of the world economy.

Third, the long-term competitiveness of American corporations depends far more on a well-educated and skilled workforce, modern infrastructure, and basic research than on tax rates. And the way we finance these necessary public investment is through … taxes.

Fourth, American corporations are now paying less in taxes than they have in 65 years. Corporate tax receipts are the lowest percentage of the economy since just after World War II. If corporate taxes are cut, you will have to pay even more in taxes in order to make up the difference.

Fifth, if their taxes were cut, corporations won’t use the extra money to make new investments in plant, equipment, research and development, or jobs. They’re already using their vast stockpiles of cash to buy back shares and thereby boost stock prices, and for extravagant bonuses and salaries to CEOs and other top executives. That’s what they would do with any additional cash.

Sixth, the reason they’re not investing more is because consumers don’t have the purchasing power to buy more, and that’s because most people’s incomes have gone nowhere for decades. And why is that? Because corporations have been holding down wages by outsourcing abroad, substituting software for jobs, contracting work out to part-time workers, and fighting unions.

A corporate tax cut is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The real problem is stagnant wages of most Americans, coupled with declining public investments in schools, roads, public transportation, and basic research – all the things average working Americans need in order to become more productive and get higher wages. To finance these we need higher corporate taxes, not lower.

September 27, 2017

We must make sure our democracy doesn’t ever again elect a candidate who loses the popular vote. That means making the Electoral College irrelevant.

Here’s how: As you probably know, the Constitution assigns each state a number of electors based on the state’s population. The total number of electors is 538, so any candidate who gets 270 of those Electoral College votes becomes president.

Article II of the Constitution says states can award their electors any way they want. So all that’s needed in order to make the Electoral College irrelevant is for states with a total of at least 270 electors to agree to award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote.

If they do that, then automatically the winner of the popular vote gets the 270 electoral college votes he or she needs to become president.

Already 10 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to do this – awarding all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote, as soon as the 270 elector goal is met. Together, these states total 165 electoral votes.

So all we need now is some additional states with 105 electors to pass the same law, agreeing to reward all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote – and it’s done. We’ll never again elect a president who loses the popular vote.

The effort is known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If your state hasn’t yet joined on, make sure it does.

September 24, 2017

When Barack Obama was president, congressional Republicans were deficit hawks. They opposed almost everything Obama wanted to do by arguing it would increase the federal budget deficit.

But now that Republicans are planning giant tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, they’ve stopped worrying about deficits.

Senate Republicans have agreed to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion over the next decade, which means giant budget deficits.

Unless Republicans want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and defense, that is. Even if Republicans eliminated everything else in the federal budget – from education to Meals on Wheels – they wouldn’t have nearly enough to pay for tax cuts of the magnitude Republicans are now touting.

But Republicans won’t cut Social Security or Medicare because the programs are overwhelmingly popular. And rather than cut defense, Senate Republicans want to increase defense spending by a whopping $80 billion (enough to fund free public higher education that Bernie Sanders proposed in last year’s Democratic primary, which deficit hawks in both parties mocked as being ridiculously expensive).

There’s also the cleanup from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, estimated to be least $190 billion. And Trump’s “wall” – which the Department of Homeland Security estimates will cost about $22 billion.

Oh, and don’t forget infrastructure. It’s just about the only major spending bill that could be passed by bipartisan majorities in both houses. Given the state of the nation’s highways, byways, public transit, water treatment facilities, and sewers, it’s desperately needed. Trump campaigned on spending $1 trillion on it.

So how do Republicans propose to pay for any of this, and a big tax cut for corporations and the wealthy – without exploding the federal deficit?

Easy. Just pretend the tax cuts will cause the economy to grow so fast – 3 percent a year on average – that they’ll pay for themselves, and the benefits will trickle down to everyone else.

If you believe this, I have several past Republican budgets to sell you, extending all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s magic asterisks.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation don’t believe it. They realistically assume that the economy won’t grow over 2 percent a year on average over the next decade.

The Federal Reserve estimates the fastest sustainable rate of economic growth will be 1.8 percent, given how slowly America’s working-age population is growing as well as the slow rate of productivity gains.

But Trump has already made a fetish out of discrediting anyone that comes up with facts he doesn’t like, and other Republicans seem ready to join him.

Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who sits on the budget committee, says he doesn’t want to rely on estimates coming from economists at the CBO and the Joint Tax Committee. He’d rather rely on supply-side economists outside government. “I do think it is time for us to have a real debate and to have real economists weighing in and we should take other things into account other than Joint Tax and C.B.O,” Corker said last week.

Unfortunately for the Republican tax cutters who used to be deficit hawks, we already have real-world historical evidence of what happens after massive tax cuts. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both cut taxes on the wealthy and ended up with huge budget deficits.

Besides, there’s no reason to cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. If anything, their taxes should be raised.

Trump says we’re “the highest taxed nation in the world.” Rubbish. The most meaningful measure is taxes paid as a percentage of GDP. On this score, the United States has the 4th lowest taxes of any major economy. (Only South Korea, Chile, and Mexico ranking lower.)

American corporations aren’t overtaxed. After taking deductions and tax credits, the typical U.S. corporation today pays an effective tax rate of 24 percent. That’s only a tad higher than the average of 21 percent among advanced nations.

The rich aren’t overtaxed. The wealthiest 1 percent in the U.S. pay the lowest taxes as a percent of their income and total wealth of the top 1 percent in any major country – and far lower than they paid in the U.S. during the first three decades after World War II, when the American economy grew faster than it’s been growing since the Reagan tax cuts.

But we do have a deficit in public investment – especially in education and infrastructure. And we do have a national debt that topped $20 trillion this year and is expected to grow by an additional $10 trillion over the next decade.

What’s the answer? Raise taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. That’s what rational politicians would do if they weren’t in the pockets of big corporations and the wealthy.

September 18, 2017

White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, said recently that “only morons pay the estate tax.”

I’m reminded of Donald Trump’s comment that he didn’t pay federal income taxes because he was “smart.” And billionaire Leona Helmsley’s "only the little people pay taxes.”

What Cohn was getting at is how easy it is nowadays for the wealthy to pass their fortunes to their children, tax-free.

The estate tax applies only to estates over $11 million per couple. And wealthy families stash away dollars above this into “dynastic” trust funds that escape additional taxes.

No wonder revenues from the estate tax have been dropping for years even as wealth has become concentrated in fewer hands. The tax now generates about $20 billion a year, which is less than 1 percent of federal revenues. And it applies to only about 2 out of every 1,000 people who die.

Now, Trump and Republican leaders are planning to cut or eliminate it altogether.

There’s another part of the tax code that Cohn might also have been referring to – capital gains taxes paid on the soaring values of the wealthy people’s stocks, bonds, mansions and works of art, when they sell them.

If the wealthy hold on to these assets until they die, the tax code allows their heirs to inherit them without paying any of these capital gains taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this loophole saves heirs $50 billion a year.

The estate and capital gains taxes were originally designed to prevent the growth of large dynasties in the U.S. and to reduce inequality.

They’ve been failing to do that. The richest 1 tenth of 1 percent of Americans now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

September 17, 2017

Have you noticed that there’s no Trump tax plan and no Republican tax plan? All they’ve come up with so far is a bunch of platitudes about how nice it would be to cut taxes, simplify the tax code, and spur economic growth.

Who doesn’t support these nice goals?

The reason there’s no tax plan is congressional Republicans are hopelessly divided on it.

Right-wing Republicans (the “Freedom Caucus” along with what’s left of the Tea Party) are most interested in reducing the size of the government and shrinking the federal deficit and debt.

Corporate and Wall Street Republicans – along with Donald Trump – are most interested in cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy. They have the backing the GOP’s big business donors who stand to make a bundle off tax cuts.

Here’s the problem. You can’t have a giant tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, and at the same time shrink the federal deficit and debt – unless you make gigantic cuts in government spending on things the American public wants and needs.

According to the Congress’s own Joint Committee on Taxation, Trump’s proposed corporate tax cuts alone would reduce federal revenue by $2 trillion over 10 years.

Cuts of this size inevitably have to come out of the federal government’s three biggest expenditures, together accounting for over two-thirds of total government spending – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and defense.

Even if you eliminated everything in the rest of the federal budget – from education to meals on wheels – you’re not going to get nearly enough to pay for the giant tax cuts Trump and his corporate and Wall Street Republicans are talking about.

But they wouldn’t dare shave a hair off Social Security. Americans who have paid into it for their lifetimes expect that it’s going to be there when they retire. Social Security is already facing some financial strains, and no politician with half a brain is going to slash it.

Medicare is almost as popular. Recall the Republican signs at Obamacare rallies that read “Don’t Take Away My Medicare.”

As to Medicaid, well, if Republicans learned one thing from the buzz saw they ran into over the Affordable Care Act it’s that they better not mess with Medicaid because a huge percentage of America’s elderly depends on it.

Which leaves defense spending. But wait. Donald Trump is on record as pledging to expand defense spending by 10 percent – $48 billion.

September 13, 2017

Senator Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Jeff Merkley, are introducing a Medicare For All bill in the Senate. It’s a model for where this nation needs to be headed.

Some background: American spending on health care per person is more than twice the average in the world’s 35 advanced economies. Yet Americans are sicker, our lives are shorter, and we have more chronic illnesses than in any other advanced nation.

That’s because medical care is so expensive for the typical American that many put off seeing a doctor until their health has seriously deteriorated.

Why is health care so much cheaper in other nations? Partly because their governments negotiate lower rates with health care providers. In France, the average cost of a magnetic resonance imaging exam is $363. In the United States, it’s $1,121. There, an appendectomy costs $4,463. Here, it’s $13,851.

The French can get lower rates because they cover everyone — which gives them lots of bargaining power.

Other nations also don’t have to pay the costs of private insurers shelling out billions of dollars a year for advertising and marketing — much of it intended to attract healthier and younger people and avoid the sicker and older.

Nor do other nations have to pay boatloads of money to the shareholders and executives of big for-profit insurance companies.

Finally, they don’t have to bear the high administrative costs of private insurers — requiring endless paperwork to keep track of every procedure by every provider.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare’s administrative costs are about 2 percent of its operating expenses. That’s less than one-sixth the administrative costs of America’s private insurers.

To make matters worse for Americans, the nation’s private health insurers are merging like mad to suck in even more money from consumers and taxpayers by reducing competition.

At the same time, their focus on attracting healthy people and avoiding sick people is creating a vicious circle. Insurers that take in sicker and costlier patients lose money, which forces them to raise premiums, co-payments and deductibles. This, in turn, makes it harder for people most in need of health insurance to afford it.

This phenomenon has even plagued health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.

Medicare for all would avoid all these problems and get lower prices and better care.

Ideally, it would be financed the same way Medicare and Social Security are financed, through the payroll tax. Wealthy Americans should pay a higher payroll tax rate and contribute more than lower-income people. But everyone would come out ahead because total health care costs would be far lower, and outcomes far better.

A Gallup poll conducted in May found that a majority of Americans would support such a system. A poll by the Pew Research Center shows that such support is growing, with 60 percent of Americans now saying government should be responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans — up from 51 percent last year.

Democrats are wise to seize the moment. The time has come for Medicare for all.

September 12, 2017

Steve Bannon recently called Trump’s firing of James Comey the biggest political mistake in modern political history. But it was more than that. It was outright obstruction of justice – another impeachable offense to add to the impeachable offenses Trump has already committed (violation of the Constitution’s “emolument’s clause,” failure to faithfully execute the laws, and abuse of power).

Obstruction of justice was among the articles of impeachment drafted against both Presidents Nixon and Clinton. The parallel between Nixon and Trump is almost exact. White House tapes revealed Nixon giving instructions to pressure the acting FBI director into halting the Watergate investigation.

It’s worth recalling that two weeks after Trump told Comey privately “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” he had another private meeting with Comey in the Oval Office. After shooing out his advisers – all of whom had top security clearance – Trump said to Comey, according to Comey’s memo written shortly after the meeting,“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

Then on May 9, Trump fired Comey. In a subsequent interview with NBC Trump said he planned to fire Comey “regardless of [the] recommendation” of the Attorney and Deputy Attorney General, partly because of “this Russia thing.” Trump also revealed in the interview that he had had several conversations with Comey about the Russia investigation, and had asked Comey if he was under investigation.

The federal crime of obstruction of justice applies to “[w]hoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law” in a proceeding or investigation by a government department or agency or Congress.

As in Nixon’s case, a decision to support an “inquiry of impeachment” resolution in the House—to start an impeachment investigation—doesn’t depend on sufficient evidence to convict a person of obstruction of justice, but simply probable cause to believe a president may have obstructed justice.

There’s already more than enough evidence of probable cause to begin that impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump.